wake

by Gillian Allnutt

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 64
Rating:

Synopsis:

When Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work ‘has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life’. Her ninth collection, wake, shows the two beginning to meld into one: to speak for, even as, one another. As her title signals, these are poems about looking back, keeping watch over the dying and death of an old world and the ways of being human in that world; but also forward, waiting for the new world and being ready to awaken to it when it comes.

There are, as always in her work, many displaced people. No one here is fully at home in the world. These are turbulent times – individually and collectively – and the poems here reflect that. And yet the poems are more ‘among’ than ‘about’ people: speaking out of the horde, and the hoard, of humanity as a whole.

Unfortunately, Gillian Allnutt’s wake was absolutely not for me. I had difficulty finding any poem I actually liked in it — maybe a line here and there, but… I just didn’t “get” it. Some of them were too short to feel like anything (though I often have that problem with very short poems), and it felt like they were lacking all the connective tissue to make them flow and make sense of them for myself.

This may have been made worse by the fact that the notes at the end of the collection weren’t obviously linked in the ebook, so I only read them after reading all of the poems already. Some of the notes do explain things a bit better, but since I had no idea they existed (I only saw the small translation notes on the same page as each poem, no sign of more info) they didn’t really have an impact on my reading experience.

Since a favourite poet of mine (Carol Ann Duffy) praised Allnutt, I was/am willing to believe it’s a deficiency in me here — though I did check back what she said exactly and it was more of a description than outright praise, so I suppose it could’ve been one of those misleading snippets where actually in the full version it’s clear that the writer wasn’t overwhelmed with it. I haven’t looked for more context… I’m just resigned to the fact that I didn’t ‘get’ or like this one.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)