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The guest from the future
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- An old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fianc� and herself. Her story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the `Lady of Shalott'. Tennyson's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its `shadows' in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed; the peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement. The modern story Stallworthy traces over the ghostly outline of the old points a parable about one function of art, what Seamus Heaney calls its power of `redress', in this or any time. Other poems in this book evoke other women survivors: the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Gilot, Picasso's mistress; a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad. Each poem engages with an earlier one, such as Akhmatova's `Poem Without a Hero' and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
- About The Author
- Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize of Poetry. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has published seven books of poetry. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently published a life of Louis MacNeice. He has edited Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, Henry Reed's Collected Poems, and several anthologies.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781857541328
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Carcanet Poetry, (28 September 1995)
- Number of Pages
- 68
- Weight
- 104 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 216 x 135 x 9 mm
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