Books by Alice Oswald
Falling Awake: Poems
by Alice Oswald
Winner of the Costa Poetry Award • Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize
“These lyrics…illustrate poetry’s unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world.” ―Washington Post Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, “give[s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial―defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets―all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.
FROM “VERTIGO”
let me shuffle forward
and tell you the two minute life of rain
starting right now
lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze
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Falling Awake: Poems
by Alice Oswald
Winner of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize: "Vivid…further proof of [Oswald's] bold engagement with poetry’s narrative possibilities." ―Teju Cole Alice Oswald’s award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial (“wryly ingenious,” said the New York Times Book Review) portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery―defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets―all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.
FROM “VERTIGO”
let me shuffle forward
and tell you the two minute life of rain
starting right now
lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze
Copies
No copies available.
Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea
by Alice Oswald
A collage of water stories from the Odyssey, reconstructed as a mesmeric and hallucinatory book-length poem by acclaimed poet Alice Oswald.
In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey―a poet abandoned on a stony island―and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god.
As with all of Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular, and liquid. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; 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.
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Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems
by Alice Oswald
Swirling like eddies in a river come the poems of Alice Oswald, who has quickly become one of the premier British poets writing today. Spacecraft Voyager 1 collects poetry from across her career ―new poems, selections from her first and more recent books, and the entirety of her masterwork to date, Dart, winner of the 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize. Oswald's speaker―always curious, often whimsical, sometimes brash―becomes the river itself, as she gives voice to the natural world and the denizens along the river Dart in Devonshire, in their unique dialects and occupations. For the first time, Spacecraft Voyager 1 introduces American readers to an essential new poet..
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$15.00
Grand Street 73: Delusions
by Edward P. Jones, Don DeLillo, Major Jackson, Alice Oswald, Salvador Dali, Gillian Wearing
In Grand Street's spring 2004 issue, lies, tricks, and deceit speak louder than truth. Edward P. Jones invokes the grand deceiver, the Devil himself, in his new short story "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River."
Don Delillo riffs on Glenn Gould, Thelonius Monk, Thomas Bernhard, and the bleak isolation of creative vision. In a newly translated selection from his novel Distant Star, Roberto Bolano recounts the literary and revolutionary travails of the enigmatic Chilean author Juan Stein. While Barcelonan Enrique Vila-Matas, in Bartleby & Co., tracks the history of artists who, in the end, "prefer not to." Also in this issue are: photographs of Edward James's surrealist sanctuary Las Pozas; portfolios by Gillian Wearing, Anita Dube, and James Ensor; and poems by Major Jackson, Alice Oswald, and Grover Amen.
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Memorial: A Version of Homer's
by Alice Oswald
“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.
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A Sleepwalk on the Severn
by Alice Oswald
An early work from the acclaimed poet of Memorial and Falling Awake, appearing for the first time in the United States.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a reflective, book-length poem in several registers, using dramatic dialogue. Ghostly, meditative, and characterized by Alice Oswald’s signature sensitivity to nature, the poem chronicles a night on the Severn Estuary as the moonrise travels through its five stages: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon, and moon reborn.
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Dart
by Alice Oswald
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.
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