Alice Oswald's poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply,
physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all
matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new
collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is
embodied life, and life's losing struggle with the gravity of nature. Working
as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic
shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it's spoken as well as how
it's thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive.
These are poems that are written to be read aloud. Orpheus and Tithonus appear
at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in
the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours – goddesses of the seasons
and the natural apportioning of Time – are the presiding figures. The
persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant
motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and
coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.
Author Biography
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her collections
include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber
Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and
Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award) and, most recently, Memorial, which won the
2013 Warwick Prize for Writing. ‘Dunt’, included in this collection, was
awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Shortlist, 2016 Costa Poetry Award