The Guest from the Future

A 70-year-old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she'd been embroidering for her fiance and herself. The poet was struck by the story's inverse relationship with that of the "Lady of Shalott". Where Tennyson's artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its "shadows" in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed, the peasant engages with the world and is sustained, art reflecting the engagement. The story Stallworthy traces over the outline of the old illustrates what Heaney calls poetry's power of "redress". This collection of poems evokes survivors, including the poet Anna Akhmatova, the painter Francoise Gilot - Picasso's mistress, and a survivor of the siege at Stalingrad. Each poem engages with an earlier one, such as Akhmatova's "Poem Without a Hero" and Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin".