Lode

Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025.

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.

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 the Covid pandemic, which  Gillian Allnutt lived through in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, 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 now threatened as never before.