Gillian Allnutt

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	Photo: © Romey Chaffer

Biography

Gillian Allnutt was born on 15 January 1949 in London, but spent much of her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge and the University of Sussex.

Since 1973 she has taught English and Creative Writing in London and Newcastle upon Tyne, and has also worked as a performer, publisher, journalist and freelance editor. She was a collective member of Sheba Feminist Publishers (1981-3), and from 1983 to 1988 was Poetry Editor at City Limits magazine.

Gillian Allnutt has published 7 major poetry collections: Spitting the Pips Out (1981); Beginning the Avocado (1987); Blackthorn (1994); Nantucket and the Angel (1997); Lintel (2001); Sojourner (2004); and How The Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems (2007). Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is also the co-editor of The New British Poetry, 1968-1988 (1988) and is the author of Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (1991).

A Royal Literary Fund Fellow from 2001-2003, Gillian Allnutt teaches Creative Writing, currently at Newcastle University. She lives in Co. Durham.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Non-fiction, Poetry

Bibliography

The Rag and Bone Man's Daughter Imagines a Happy Family   Privately Printed, 1978

Spitting the Pips Out   Sheba, 1981

Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal (1862)   (pamphlet)   Greville Press, 1985

Beginning the Avocado   Virago, 1987

The New British Poetry, 1968-1988   (co-editor)   Paladin, 1988

Berthing: A Poetry Workbook   NEC/Virago, 1991

Blackthorn   Bloodaxe, 1994

Nantucket and the Angel   Bloodaxe, 1997

Lintel   Bloodaxe, 2001

Hob Green   (pamphlet)   Phoenix Poetry Pamphlets (France), 2004

Sojourner   Bloodaxe, 2004

How the Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems   Bloodaxe, 2007

Read about books by Gillian Allnutt at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Gillian Allnutt at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1998   T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   Nantucket and the Angel

2001   T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)   Lintel

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Critical Perspective

Gillian Allnutt became known as one of the feminist poets who came to prominence in the 1980s, along with Michèle Roberts, Alison Fell and Michelene Wandor.  She was Poetry Editor of City Limits from
1983-8. Her first book, Spitting the Pips Out (1981), was very characteristic of this era and the voice almost seems the collective voice of the age rather than Allnutt's own. As the book's blurb says: 'Though the story is autobiographical, many women will recognise it as their own'. The book is long for a poetry collection (140 pages) because it contains many prose notebook entries.

Allnutt studied philosophy and when she did develop her own voice, from Beginning the Avocado (1987), a wry philosophical note was strongly apparent. By nature she is a sacramental poet and philosophy helps her develop her conceits. The first poem in Beginning the Avocado, is one of her best and most anthologized poems. Beginning with an epigraph from Alexander Blok - 'To depict a (bicycle), you must first come to love (it)' - it develops the conceit of the lover-seen-as-bicycle through many ingenious turns of the pedals and ends: 'I'd have you know that  // not with three-in-one / but with my own // heart's spittle I anoint your moving parts'.

Philosophy infuses 'Bright Cambridge Day':

                '... no one dares moon there
save a particular duck-billed élite
who quack only when they know how to prove
inductively or deductively
their ineluctable right to do so.'

The classic Cambridge pastime of punting also gets a metaphysical treatment:

'Tilting the sky at will -
You hand me your soul
As if it were a punt pole
I must learn to get along with,
Awkwardly.

I am impaled.
The river's made a fool of me.'
                           ('Metaphysical')

Allnutt comes from the Northeast and moved back there in 1988 after many years in London. As her work developed, spare nature imagery straight out of the moors of Northumberland was allied to an equally spare spiritual quest. As John Greening put it, on the back cover: 'Allnutt is a poet of considerable spiritual scope, one whose sense of "old forgotten bridle-paths" pushes English mystical nature poetry a few inches into the next millennium and whose awareness that this is nevertheless still "dirty England", "a land of blown plastic bags", gives her lightning visions a secure earth'.  Already, in 'Epiphany' this note is starting to appear: 'When blackthorn lays the mind bare to the bone.' Blackthorn, an emblem of her chosen landscape, would later become the title of one of her books.

But for the time being, the urban world and poetry preoccupy her more. Poetry's female suicides are the subject of 'Why Not':

'Perhaps I shall go on more like a cigarette,
watching my ashes grow
and my small tongue of fire slow, tire.'

Blackthorn (1994) marks her return to the Northeast, with many poems about the territory. The poet/critic Sean O'Brien (who lives in Newcastle) said of the book: 'The actual district was Benwell, which is not for the faint-hearted, but Allnutt brings to it a slightly unearthly lyricism' (Poetry Review, Winter 1994/5). Her description is astringent, blanched. In 'Clara Street', 'Many small stones are the sea's washboard.' But the oracular note which was there in her poetry from 'Ode' on, is equally developed:

'Beautiful are your feet with shoes and they shall enroll
themselves in my most intimate thought.'

O'Brien compares her to Stevie Smith and says: 'Allnutt can be as willfully disruptive of decorum, but at the same time, landscape, climate, and the solid objects within them provide a harder-edged, less talky world than Smith's, and one against which Allnutt's spiritual concerns test themselves dramatically'.

Nantucket and the Angel (1997) is a book replete with figures of strong old women, for example the feisty granny of 'Reading Chair': 'She's a riot and a reverence of thought, apparent / quiet, espresso, coffee pot'. 'Rain' is one of her finest, most winnowed lyrics: the oracular note now at times reminiscent of Christopher Smart:

'He opens his wings like butterflies or bi-planes out beyond the wood
She opens her drawer of bread.
All her mistakes are laid before her.
Liberty bodices, lepidoptera.'

Lintel (2001) has many poems in a similar mood, with the usual raw imagery: 'the hollowed bones of thought', 'your four bare crooked tines.' The title poem, 'Tabitha and Lintel', is a fable that seems to cross the Bible with Bronte imagery. At times here, her fraught imagery attains a new intensity: 'Maidanek, a maddenstead, a mountain, enclosed, of shoes.' Maidanek was one of the Nazi extermination camps. She can be boldly declamatory, as in 'Annaghmakwerrig':

'It is the swallows that sped through my room by mistake
Like the sparrow that speeds from dark to dark
Through the meadhall.'

The sparrow in the meadhall is, of course, the famous image from Bede, one of the great Northumbrians and a constant reference point for Allnutt.

The cold comfort of much of what passes for contemporary spiritual and artistic life is a strong concern in Lintel:

'Lord, they are filling the isles with gait and shuffle.
Lord, we have laid on carols

For all those with learning difficulties...'
                                 ('Advent in the Cathedral')

Gillian Allnutt is a quietly original poet who has followed an uncompromising path. In its inwardness, its emblematic use of nature and its intense spiritual quest, her poetry is in the line of Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. Her tone and verbal music is quite her own.

Peter Forbes, 2003

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Bloodaxe Books Ltd Highgreen Tarset Northumberland  NE48 1RP England Tel: +44 (0)1434 240500 Fax: +44 (0)1434 240505 E-mail: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com http://www.bloodaxebooks.com

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