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Alice OswaldAlice Oswald
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Biography
Alice Oswald lives in Dartington, Devon, and works as a gardener on the Dartington Estate. She trained as a classicist and was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 1994. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), includes poems reflecting her love of gardening and the entertaining long poem, 'The Men of Gotham'. This collection won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work which combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a '… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference …' (The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, her poem 'Dunt' won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).
Her latest books are Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica Greenman, shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize; and A Sleepwalker on the Severn (2009), a poem for several voices.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Poetry
Bibliography
The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile Oxford University Press, 1996
Dart Faber and Faber, 2002
Earth Has Not Any Thing to Shew More Fair: A Bicentennial Celebration of Wordsworth's Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge (co-editor with Peter Oswald and Robert Woof) Shakespeare's Globe & The Wordsworth Trust, 2002
The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (editor) Faber and Faber, 2005
Woods etc. Faber and Faber, 2005
A Sleepwalker on the Severn Faber and Faber, 2009
Weeds and Wild Flowers (illustrated by Jessica Greenman) Faber and Faber, 2009
Prizes and awards
1994 Eric Gregory Award
1996 Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
1997 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
2002 T. S. Eliot Prize Dart
2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Woods etc.
2005 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Woods etc.
2007 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) ('Dunt')
2007 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Woods etc.
2009 T. S Eliot Prize (shortlist) Weeds and Wild Flowers
Critical Perspective
Alice Oswald is a poet of word-and- water music: 'I saw the river's dream-self walk / down to the ringmesh netting by the bridge / to feel the edge of shingle brush the edge / of sleep and float a world up like a cork / out of its body's liquid dark'. As these lines suggest, taken from Dart (2002), one of the most highly-praised long poems of recent years, she is perhaps a nature mystic, attempting to express the intangible and spiritual, in ways oddly beautiful and visionary. Her poetry takes place in the open, and usually on water - the sea, rivers, estuaries, or in gardens soaked by 'soft malevolent' English rain. It is full of romantic imagery, energized by free-flowing rhythms, songs and ballads, and the oddities of speech. Dart takes its entire 48-page book length to chart the 'mutterings' of the river Dart in Devon, 'its many strands overclambering one another, / so many word-marks, momentary traces / in wind-script of the world's voices'. Her work certainly implies metaphysical and spiritual dimensions in nature, and she has remarked that 'all that water is only the map-symbol of a search for something - for a language .... [and] Ideally I'd create water, but I've had to make do with mimicking it - a rush of selves, a stronghold of other life-forms'.
She is one of the most unusual new poets of recent years, both of her collections being prizewinners, and among her influential admirers are Michael Longley and Carol Ann Dufiy. She has herself pointed out her affinities with classical poets Homer and Virgil, the poet-gardener lan Hamilton Finlay, and sculptor Barbara Hepworth. But literary influences are surely also Gerard Manley Hopkins (for his rhythms and rhyming effects), Walter de la Mare's romantic imagery of moon and sea; the Dylan Thomas of Under Milk Wood, choreographing multifarious voices, and Ted Hughes's eye for the natural world: 'The whole river transforms upon an otter,n/... swimming above the fish, - half of the air, / half of the darkness' ('Otter Out and In'). In readings, apparently Oswald often recites from memory, and she draws attention to her purpose of 'imagination and its object in argument', with alert rhythms, switching and rising. Readers and listeners should take her work slowly, giving its rhythmic pulses time to work.
She likes to emphasize the physical properties of language. Indeed, when her debut collection The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile was published in 1996, Oswald described her poetic method then as being like dry-stone walling, 'finding discrete blocks of words and jamming them together to make something unshakeable'. She was and is a gardener-poet by training and occupation: a variety of poems about gardening appear in the book, from the descriptive 'Pruning in Frost', 'With a task and a rake, / with a clay-slow boot and a yellow mack' to her characteristic quasi-religious view of a glasshouse as 'a hole in the rain, / the sun's chapel, / a bell for the wind'. There is a Stanley Spencer-like vision of 'Gardeners at the Resurrection', or simply in 'The Apple Shed' sheltering from rain. 'Here I work in the hollow of God's hand', another confides, 'the flowers come, the rain follows the wind' ('Prayer'). The collection has a remarkable variety, including as it does a succession of estuary and sea sonnets, and cleverly metaphysical love poems. There are ballad forms like 'The Pilchard-Curing Song', and spiritual flights of fancy in which owls are 'throwing the host between them, / owls with two faces singing Ave and Ouch Ave and Ouch' ('Owl Village'). The poet remarks that she has 'a moon's task - staring at seas'. And her narratives of sea and moon are concluded with a lengthy philosophical poem, 'The Wise Men of Gotham', who are legendary medieval fishermen attempting to catch the moon, only to find that 'the moon herself/ has caught us in a net'. The poet hears their voices on the waves, as 'they moved far out between absurdity and wonder'.
Oswald remarked in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 1996, 'I want my next poems to reflect more of ... [a] kind of complexity, that criss-cross and open-endedness', demands amply fulfilled in her triumphantly polyphonic poem Dart. She herself describes the book-length 48-page work as 'a map poem or song line ... the structure comes off the river, the transitions [are] geographical not rational'. The poem's raw material was firstly the recordings that she herself made, the talk of people who live and work on the river; prose passages edited and shaped. Between them she interpolates lyrical episodes, rhyming quatrains, ballad and song-like forms, free verse, all blended into a miraculously free-flowing narrative. The poem's beauty is that it presents these human stories within a succession of voices by turns mythic, animal, even industrial, dissolving in and out of the water's course. The poet's own voice takes its place among many others; all are allotted their place amongst the river's flow of language, nature, history, and myth.
This is the river Dart telling its own story through the voices of the people, whether salmon poacher, naturalist, boat builder, but also industrial workers at sewage plant and dairy; a chambermaid, river pilot, ferryman, botanist. Swimmers, town boys, a drowned canoeist, and boats; dead tin miners speak, as well as and mythic figures; 'the King of the Oakwoods'; a water nymph with a 'cataract of hair, / at work all night on my desire', sings to a woodman; Jan Coo, 'the groom" of the river, and an otter speaks while 'streaking from the headwaters'. The cumulative effect brings together human and natural history into a synthesis containing workaday lives, the metaphysical, nature, language, and dreams. Also the sounds of the river, its musicians 'Cymene and Semaia, sweeping a plectrum along the stones': 'Glico of the Running Streams / and Spio of the Boulders-Encaved-In-the-River's-Edges' / and all other named varieties of Water / such as Loops and Swirls in their specific dialects / clucking and clapping'.
Despite Oswald's claim not to be a Nature Poet, her poem contains much close observation of birds, fish and insects and their habitats by others. A woman naturalist tells about Large Blue butterflies and the lovesongs of frogs, 'the soundmarks of larks'. She also recalls seeing a heron 'eat an eel alive / and the eel chewed its way back inside out through the heron's stomach'. And a fisherman knows the places where the salmon 'holds back / to rub the sea-lice off his belly'. Having begun with an old man on Dartmoor, the poem finally observes seals 'with their grandmother mouths'. The journey ends appropriately with the author herself, 'anonymous, water's soliloquy, // All names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, /... Driving my many selves from cave to cave'. Reading Alice Oswald can restore one's faith in poetry, and restore the spirit. Hers are beautiful lines, rhythmically rich and fully humane.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
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