Alice Oswald's first book of poems, The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile is more confident and achieved than many first collections. Previously published in Anvil New Poets 2, a selection chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and winner of the 1994 Eric Gregory Award, Oswald already clearly demonstrates a distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily beautiful: intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham, a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally talented young poet.

The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile (The Oxford Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Oswald, Alice

Poetry

Oxford University Press

“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.

Memorial: A Version of Homer's

W.W.Norton&Company

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

Falling Awake: Poems

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 PostFalling 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

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.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn

Woods etc.

History & Criticism

Faber&Faber

The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. 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.

Dart (Faber Poetry)

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Books by Oswald, Alice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oswald, Alice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile (The Oxford Poets)

Memorial: A Version of Homer's

Falling Awake: Poems

Memorial: A Version of Homer's

Falling Awake: Poems

A Sleepwalk on the Severn

Woods etc.

The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile

A Sleepwalk on the Severn

Dart (Faber Poetry)