indwelling

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. Both serious and light in touch, humane and profound, this new collection explores the manifestations of the Spirit, tracing it back through the familiar world of Christianity to its roots in the shamanic. This journey goes 'about and roundabout': living in past and present simultaneously; seeking to marry masculine and feminine - in the figure of Mary Magdalene, say, or those of the almost ghostly mother and son in 'Steppe' or 'In Armenia'. The language of these poems inhabits the state, the indwelling, of meditation - that nest of thin air - berthing what, a moment ago, was neither here nor there. indwelling is Gillian Allnutt's first new collection since Wolflight (2007), included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems.