Falling Awake: Poems

Oswald, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393285286 ISBN 13: 9780393285284

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

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

Review:

[Oswald] writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, 'Tithonus, ' may be the most beautiful work I read all year.--Dan Chiasson "Best Books of Poetry of 2016 "

Oswald's choices are subtle at first, as she intermingles stark images -- such as a rotting swan -- with exquisite writing and inserts characters from Greek mythology into the English countryside. These lyrics, while often dark, illustrate poetry's unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world.

Alice Oswald's poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world. . . . [P]oems of simple, stunning beauty.

Nothing is quite like Oswald's 'Tithonus.' . . . Extraordinarily intriguing.

With the sparkle of black jewels; for all poetry fans.

Uncompromising and precise visions of a haunting range of experiences and obscure actions.

Minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant. . . . [A] perpetual inspiration.--Best Books of 2016

[Oswald] writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions.--Twelve Best Poetry Collections of 2016

Book Description:

The finest living British poet comes to Cape with her extraordinary new book

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize

A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year