Guest From The Future

Stallworthy's poems evoke women survivors: the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Gilot, Picasso's lover; a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad; and a woman who escaped war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fiance and herself. This refugee's 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; Stallworthy's peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement