Alice Oswald
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 Societ