Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025. Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt’s poems as ‘at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron’. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness. The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book. That sense of stability ended with the Covid pandemic, which  Gillian Allnutt lived through in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book.  The poems in the book’s third part, Earth-hoard , are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world now threatened as never before. ‘Her writing roams across centuries, very different histories and lives, and draws together, without excuse or explanation, moments which link across country, class, culture and time… Her poems progress over the years to a kind of synthesis of word-play and meditation. In her work the space between what is offered and what is withheld is every bit as important as what is said. She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure.’ – Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate, for The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Award Committee ‘Allnutt’s 10th collection is divided into three parts, tracing memories of her early life after the second world war, then through into lockdown, before reaching back into a pre-industrial landscape that reminds us “We are momentary, dust. // We are neither first nor last.” There are some indelible images in the poems […] More than this, Allnutt suggests there is a space beyond time that we can sometimes glimpse, and perhaps even gain comfort from…’  – Rishi Dastidar,  The Guardian  (Poetry Books of the Month) ‘Allnutt’s poems move between playfulness and austerity, eccentricity and anonymity. These might be distinctly English qualities – there’s a line here to poets such as Stevie Smith, Geoffrey Hill and Peter Didsbury. Ultimately, though, she resists comparison.  Lode  isn’t a departure from anything since Blackthorn (1994), her breakthrough collection. But this latest book may yet make her a lodestar for more readers, if they find their way to it. They should.’  – Jeremy Wikeley,  The Telegraph  (Poetry Book of the Month) 'Gillian Allnutt’s spare, elegiac poems are like runes on bone; messages from another world... There is rich thought compressed within these poems, where spirituality is all the more telling for its quiet capacity to surprise.’ – Martyn Halsall,  Church Times  [on  wake ] ‘… Allnutt’s poems disclose the spiritual that is always already a part of the natural world. They attempt to open up new channels of contact between faith and humanity that can transcend historical or geographical limitations. These musical poems function like prayers, for those displaced and forgotten.’ – Nell Osborne,  The Compass ‘… Gillian Allnutt is humble, minimal: her quiet work has often gone unnoticed by contemporary town-criers (though it bagged the Queen’s Gold Medal in 2016). Allnutt has been writing for some decades, and deservedly possesses a devoted following. Her latest volume, Lode , will feel familiar to long-time readers: here we find God, small things, anchoritic loneness, history, the North; and a simple, firm poetic texture, short lines and glinting abstractions in strawbeds of solidity.’ – Camille Ralphs, The Tablet 'Allnutt's power is in her restraint. [..] The last line of verse in the collection is 'World without edge'; a fresh doxology for a still unknowable modern world, and the perfect final note for a quietly boundless collection that confirms Allnutt as one of the best English poets writing today.'  – Mary Anne Clarke, The Little Review ‘ Lode is the new collection by Gillian Allnutt, a poet whose extraordinary and elegant work is deeply placed within the North. […] Her latest collection is a landmark work full of insight, observation and learning, taking us deep into her unique poetic world.’ – Will Mackie, New Writing North (New and Recent Poetry from the North) '…there’s no better poet alive in England, and no better poet of England, either. […] At its best – which is most of it – Allnutt’s poetry is lovely, strange and wise. These are profound and beautiful meditations on ordinary lives and the miracle of everyday language.