The guest from the future : Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin

The Guest from the Future is a selection of poetry by one of the Norton college department's most redoubtable editors, Professor Jon Stallworthy of Oxford University. 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 Gilot, 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