Music meets myth in Oswald’s dreamlike visions of a West Country landscape
The first thing to say about Alice Oswald’s eagerly awaited book is that it does not disappoint. Her characteristic, Ted Hughesian voice is in full song. Once again she delivers us from the quotidian, and offers instead a West Country landscape that is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes pure dream, and is always “sliding at the speed of light straight […] on to the surface of the eye”.
The second thing to say is that Falling Awake really is a poetry collection. No other contemporary poet of note has proved as resistant as Oswald to the charms of this form; no other British poet writing in the lyric mainstream has managed to dodge its specific constraints so successfully. Since her crystalline debut, 1996’s The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, she has published two book-length river poems, an album of flower poems, the astonishing performance piece Memorial about Homer’s dead, and just one further, relatively slight “straight” collection. This restless experimentation has more in common with North American poets such as Claudia Rankine than with anyone else writing in the UK.
Related: Alice Oswald: ‘I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else’
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