Alice Oswald pulls off a feat in her seventh collection: she finds words for encounters with nature that ordinarily defy language. From a laurel tree in which she hides as a child to a morning’s weeding to hearing larks under a cold sun – “I notice the dark sediment of their singing/covers the moors like soot blown under a doorway” – she articulates what you might occasionally recognise but have never before seen described. It is an astonishing book of beauty, intensity and poise – a revelation. Some of the poems are inspired by mythology (as was her superb last collection Memorial), most are unmediated, autobiographical, witnessed.
Water is her element – her book-length poem Dart, about the Devon river, won the 2002 TS Eliot prize. Water flows through this collection too. The opening poem, A Short Story of Falling, has a Blakean simplicity and reach: a good poem about water should flow and this one does: a column of couplets unimpeded by punctuation (in common with all the writing here). Half way through the opening poem, she takes a risk, pours herself into the beautiful couplet: “if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of glass”.
She includes aspects of nature that are not soliciting, that are almost asking not to be described
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