Falling Awake – Poems - Softcover

Oswald, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393355454 ISBN 13: 9780393355451

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

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

About this title

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 from 2016 "

After having exhausted language once, Oswald has returned to exhaust it again, her own voice speaking over the corpses of the world's ever-present erosion...and challenging herself and her readers to conceptualize what new shape can come when the last reiterated 'whip of sparks' in the world and its many spheres has 'gone, ' and then gone again.

[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention.

Alice Oswald's poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world.

Stunning.... 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.

You won't experience the full effect of Alice Oswald's poetry unless you read her words aloud--she writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions.

[A] modern classic.--Book of the Year

A liminal text.... Unmistakably original.--Book of the Year

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

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0393355454
• ISBN 13: 9780393355451
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96