The Guest from the Future

It represents what Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate in literature, called arts power of "redress." Stallworthys poems evoke women survivors; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Cilot, Picassos 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 refugees story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the "Lady of Shalott" Tennysons patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its "shadows" in her mirror opts for the world and is destroyed; Stallworthys peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement.