The Guest from the Future

It represents what Seamus Heaney the Nobel Laureate in literature called art''s power of redress. Stallworthy''s poems evoke women survivors; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Cilot Picasso''s 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 refugee''s 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 its shadows in her mirror opts for the world and is destroyed; Stallworthy''s peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement.