Alice Oswald

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.' - Alice Oswald

An Excavation of the Iliad

Memorial

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Dart

Falling Awake

This is a book-length poem – a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey – about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters – Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes – who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water – fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid. one person has the character of dust another has an arrow for a soul but their stories all end somewhere in the sea

Nobody

a version of Homer's Iliad

Paul Keegan

A Weather Anthology

Gigantic Cinema

A sensational new collection from the author of Dart. Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third book of poems, and follows on from the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem, Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. The poems in her new book compress this uniquely ruminative voice into a dazzlingly various sequence of lyrics about the natural order and the individual life within. Written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.

Woods Etc

William Tillyer

A sleepwalk on the Severn

Ian Duhig

Vahni Capildeo

Melissa Lee-Houghton

Forward Various

Forward Book of Poetry 2017

A collection of poems and etchings. It beckons us toward a landscape of botanical characters, and invites us to see ourselves among them.

Weeds and Wild Flowers

Seamus Heaney

Kathleen Jamie

Richard Murphy

Robert MacFarlane

Michael Longley

Derek Mahon

Sinéad Morrisey

Andrew McNellie

Deirdre Chonghaile

Archipelago Anthology

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald's first collection of poems, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice. Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the book introduced readers to her meditative, intensely musical style, and her breath-taking gift for visionary writing. 'The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr . . . a fresh and exciting first collection.' Kathleen Jamie, Times Literary Supplement 'an inspired debut of lightly-worn wisdom and verbal panache.' John Fuller 'Alice Oswald throws the windows of the imagination open; she places a fingertip on the pulse of tradition, and proves it is still very much alive.' The Times

The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile

“The most remarkable and affecting book of poetry I encountered this year.”—James Wood, The New Yorker In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad—the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen—in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer’s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer’s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life.

Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad

Memorial. Uno scavo dell'Iliade. Testo inglese a fronte

In der Lyrik der Gegenwart ist Alice Oswalds Werk einzigartig; ein Plädoyer für die Dimension des Hörens, ein Lauschen auf die feinen lautlichen Differenzen und ein Rückgriff auf eine Lyrik, deren lebendige Farbigkeit sie für uns neu entdeckt: Homer steht wieder am Horizont. Alice Oswalds Gedichte entstehen aus der Stimme. Wie Homers Epen sind sie gesprochene Ereignisse. Auf ihren Lesungen trägt sie ihre Lyrik stehend und auswendig vor. Ihre Musen sind das Auge und die Erinnerung. Und trotzdem, es ist eine Lyrik der großen Bögen: In »Memorial« gedenkt sie den Fußsoldaten, die bei Homer fallen – nicht den Helden gilt ihr Augenmerk, sondern den Opfern in den Fugen der Geschichte. In einem anderen Text verwandelt sie mit Homers Gleichnissen im Gepäck das Erwachen des Lichts in ein Epos: »46 Minuten im Leben der Morgendämmerung«. »Ungeheuer gelungen ... Unvergesslich.« Teju Cole »Jedes meiner Bücher markiert eine Grenze, über die ich in das nächste Land weiterziehe.« Alice Oswald

Memorial - Fallen-erwachen. Gedichte

46 Minuten im Leben der Dämmerung

Sir Thomas Wyatt

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in Kent in 1503 and educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He served Henry VIII as a diplomat in Europe but was imprisoned and almost executed for his close relationship with Anne Boleyn. On his release, Wyatt became Sheriff of Kent and later Ambassador to Spain, and died 1542 from a fever caught on a diplomatic mission.

Poems

Taking for her subject our human planet, or what Robert Lowell called 'this sweet volcanic cone', Alice Oswald has chosen 101 poems which map the border between the personal and natural worlds. Including poems by William Barnes, Robert Frost, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes, Hugh MacDiarmid, John Ashbery and many others, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet casts its net worldwide, historically and geographically, engaging restlessly with the many-centred energies of the natural world.

101 Poems for the Planet

The Thunder Mutters

'This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem, which was written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us - its effect on water and its effect on voices.' Alice Oswald A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a poem for several voices, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead - all based on real people from the Severn catchment - talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. Commissioned for the 2009 festival of the Severn, Alice Oswald's breathtakingly original new work aims to record what happens when the moon moves over the sublunary world: its effect on water and its effect on language.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn

‘It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads. The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

Alice Oswald

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