Our Stefan Tobler’s recent reading tip:
Alice Oswald’s seventh collection Falling Awake (2016, Jonathan Cape) is the leisure time reading that most astounded me recently. I’ve long loved her writing and the poems in this book are among her very best. If you haven’t yet, pick it up in a bookshop and you’ll see. (It was sitting on the well-stocked poetry shelves of The Book Case, Hebden Bridge, waiting for me.) Try ‘Fox’, about a mother fox, ‘a woman with a man’s voice’, who ‘barked at my house […] in the heart’s thick accent’:
as if to say: it’s midnight
and my life
is laid beneath my children
like gold leaf
Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker takes it to be a poem about the ‘fear every parent has felt: that they will wake to find that their children have died in their beds’, but personally I heard a mother fox waking a human mother into a new understanding of motherhood and of herself.
And listen to the head of Orpheus, in ‘Severed Head Floating Downriver’, becoming part of the river but who wishes: ‘if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out’.
And in her 40-page ‘Tithonus’ hear and watch dawn arrive, minute by minute one midsummer, as it is experienced by an ancient man. The eponymous Tithonus of Greek mythology is a man condemned never to die. Eos, the dawn, who is in love with Tithonus, had asked Zeus to make him immortal, and so he lies there: ‘a man rolls over and pulls / his grief to his chin and his feet have / no covers’. He is a lonely man, always looking on as the dawn approaches yet again in all her (in this poem: very English) manifestations (a ‘lark in a prayer-draught’, ‘crows with their rusty voice-handles’), and he wishes for death. I hope these glimpses will suggest to you how her poetry is too human for her to be labelled a ‘nature poet’.
Like Basil Bunting, for example, Alice Oswald’s poetry listens intently to lives lived in a particular locality, in her case rural Devon, to say things in a way that are a complete surprise to the reader, but instantly recognisable as the right words. In Basil Bunting’s poem ‘Briggflatts’ the mason says: ‘Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write.’ While that mason wrote in stone, Oswald once likened her composition to the dry-stone method of making a wall, ‘finding discrete blocks of words and jamming them together to make something unshakable’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 1996). More recently, as Claire Armitstead reported in The Guardian, at Oswald’s ‘book launch [for Falling Awake] she explained that she had begun to envisage her work not as poems so much as “sound carvings”. “I like the idea that sound carving suggests there’s something there already.”’ What is striking is that the finished poetry is not like a stone carving or a stone wall, but quick-flighted, changeable, of the moment, apparently from inside the experience of waters, animals, flowers and people.
For an insight into some of Oswald’s influences, and simply for your pleasure, I’d also recommend you look beyond the programmatic subtitle (101 Poems for the Planet) and read the anthology she edited The Thunder Mutters (Faber & Faber, 2005). In it, Oswald’s attention to people’s contact with – and merging into – the non-human takes in work songs by sailors and cotton pickers, formally adventurous poets from the Futurist poet Marinetti to the contemporary poet Tom Atkins, as well as the oral poetry from many peoples, including the incredible Australian Aboriginal song of place, ‘Song-Cycle of the Moon-Bone’, all pointing to her deep engagement with a wide range of poetries. She finds in oral poetry, an ‘accretive rather than syntactic’ structure, as she says in her introduction to the anthology, and links it to the poetics of poems like Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ and Ashberry’s ‘Into the Dusk-charged Air’. These poems ‘work like lists, little heaps of self-sufficient sentences that keep the poem open to the many-centred energies of the natural world’. (And ‘Tithonus’ is one such poem if ever there was one.) Oswald’s poems tune us into our physical, animal lives; they jolt us awake.