The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book.
That sense of stability ended with Covid, which found Gillian Allnutt isolated in the former pit village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book.
The poems in the book’s third part, Earth-hoard, are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world which is now threatened as never before.
‘Her writing roams across centuries, very different histories and lives, and draws together, without excuse or explanation, moments which link across country, class, culture and time… Her poems progress over the years to a kind of synthesis of word-play and meditation. In her work the space between what is offered and what is withheld is every bit as important as what is said. She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure.’ – Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate, for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Award Committee
'Gillian Allnutt’s spare, elegiac poems are like runes on bone; messages from another world... There is rich thought compressed within these poems, where spirituality is all the more telling for its quiet capacity to surprise.’ – Martyn Halsall, Church Times [on wake]
‘… Allnutt’s poems disclose the spiritual that is always already a part of the natural world. They attempt to open up new channels of contact between faith and humanity that can transcend historical or geographical limitations. These musical poems function like prayers, for those displaced and forgotten.’ – Nell Osborne, The Compass
'Wake, Gillian Allnutt's new collection, is a contemporary pilgrim's progress, confronting doubt and the cruelties of the world both now and in a historic perspective. She travels the border between this world and the world of the spirit, combining the two in radiantly-spare poems, beyond-haunting, yet grounded in the moment.. a profound examination of human experience in language both searing and serene.' – Penelope Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry
‘Meditation is the filter through which themes, intertexts and language are developed. This gives a personal, multi-layered dimension to the poems pointing to a search for a greater significance and a deeper sense of life. Nevertheless, the poems are not abstract or unreachable to the general reader; on the contrary they are rooted in ordinary life that emerges in words, objects and stories.’ – Carla Scarano, London Grip [on wake]
‘To read her poems is to be struck by their elemental, worn, limber intelligence, what Adam Thorpe, the poet, playwright and novelist, praises as their sense of ‘half-revealed mystery’. Her startling, beautiful, mythic work was recognised earlier this year with the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.’ – Jonathan Doering, The Friend [introducing an interview with Gillian Allnutt]
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