Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2016
It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower
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.
Publisher: Vintage PublishingISBN: 9781910702437Number of pages: 96Weight: 114 gDimensions: 197 x 133 x 9 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'She says that poetry is what happens when language becomes impossible. If you've never read her - get this collection now.'- Jeanette Winterson,The Guardian,Book of the Year
"'A) modern classic.'- Jeremy Noel-Tod,The Sunday Times,Book of the Year
'A miraculous collection.'- Kate Kellaway,The Observer,Book of the Year
'A liminal text... Unmistakably original.'- Craig Raine,The Times Literary Supplement,Book of the Year
'A sublime poet of the natural world.'- Rupert Thomson,The Herald,Book of the Year
'An astonishing book of beauty,intensity and poise - a revelation...The collection's title is spot on. I cannot think of any poet who is more watchful or with a greater sense of gravity.'- Kate Kellaway,The Observer
'Stunning. Is she now our greatest living poet()... Her work is commanding... She is less twinkly-eyed than Simon Armitage,more committed to experimentation than Duffy and just as playful...as Don Paterson. For sheer,sustained invention and intellectual rigour,her work is perhaps closest to Kei Miller... If there's any justice in the poetry world,the title (Poet Laureate) should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again.'- Charlotte Runcie,The Daily Telegraph
Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald celebrates nature like no other modern poet. A legacy of her training as a gardener,she has imbued the natural world with a power and resonance across seven collections of poetry,including the immersive melding of prose and poetry Dart,a meditation on the eponymous Devon river written over a period of three years. Her numerous awards include the Forward Poetry Prize and the TS Eliot Prize.
Visit the Alice Oswald author page
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