Gillian Allnutt's Lintel gives us poems of the threshold; poems that stand at the edge, looking back as well as forward; poems that arise out of known, imagined and imaginary places, such as the landscape of Tabitha and Lintel (somewhere between Haworth and the Holy Land). They show the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness in which the arational is decried as irrational. But Gillian Allnutt's poems are also ambivalent in their approach to history, embracing change where the past needs to be broken with while at the same time holding on to what needs to be salvaged from the wreckage. As the wild girl Lintel, serving in the convent, says: 'It'll be as if I'd brought the breakers in with me.' Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.