The Guest from the Future

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 itsshadows' 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.