Gillian Allnutt and remembering William Martin | Bloodaxe Books

Gillian Allnutt and remembering William Martin

In association with Bloodaxe Books

Bloodaxe Books is publishing books by two eminent North-East poets in May 2025.

Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016. Two of her nine collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The poems in her new collection, Lode, trace a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives since the Second World War. As well as meaning a journey or a course, lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years. That sense of stability ended with Covid, which found Gillian Allnutt isolated in the former pit village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, her home for the past 30 years. There are also poems informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world which is now threatened as never before.

William Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the mythology and sacred sites of India. He also drew on children’s games, ballads and street songs in poems showing both political anger and a wider concern for a society losing its common ground, its rituals and rites of passage. The editors of his retrospective, Marratide, Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell, will talk about Bill Martin – as he was known to all – and his work, and play audio recordings of some of Bill’s memorable incantatory readings of his poems.