Alice Oswald has been awarded the Eric Gregory Award, an Arts Foundation
Award for Poetry, the Forward Prize, the Ted Hughes Award,
and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She lives in Devon, England.
Falling Awake: Poems
by Alice Oswald
Paperback
(Reprint)
$15.95
- ISBN-13: 9780393355451
- Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
- Publication date: 02/27/2018
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 96
- Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)
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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
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Daily Telegraph
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.Herald
A sublime poet of the natural world.Times Literary Supplement
A liminal text.… Unmistakably original.Sunday Times
[A] modern classic.Guardian
[Falling Awake] does not disappoint.… Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority.Observer
Alice Oswald pulls off a feat in her seventh collection: she finds words for encounters with nature that ordinarily defy language.… [Falling Awake] is an astonishing book of beauty, intensity and poise—a revelation.Poetry Daily
Alice Oswald’s poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world.Boston Review
[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention.Los Angeles Review of Books
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.Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker
[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.Library Journal
06/15/2016In this new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize winner Oswald, life is seen as a continual tumbling downward. Rain "rises to the light and falls again," while elsewhere "clouds close their options and the whole// melancholy air/ surrenders to pure fear and/ falls." A fly falls stunned at the window, a badger falls "like a suitcase" to the shovel, and night falls "as if dropped from a great height." If precipitation permeates these pages (because the author is British?), there's less a sense of dank than edgy foreboding. Even the local village appears less quaint than sinister, and several fablelike poems have a Grimm feel: "Three people in the snow/ getting rid of themselves/ breath by breath// and every six seconds a blackbird." VERDICT With the sparkle of black jewels; for all poetry fans.