Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald 

(born 31 August 1966) is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire.

Alice Oswald lives in Devon. 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 subsequent books are Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica

Greenman, shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize and winner of the inaugural Ted
Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), a poem for
several voices; Memorial (2011), a 'filleting' of The Iliad which was shortlisted for the
T.S. Eliot Prize (though Oswald withdrew from the competition in protest against the
prize's funding); and Falling Awake (2016), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the
Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Oswald’s voice arrived almost fully formed: surefooted yet delicate,

bold yet attentive, marrying extravagance with humaneness and
humour. A second volume, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Dart (2002),
brought her work to prominence. A capacious book-length poem, it
unfolds, in the poet’s own words, as “a map poem or song line”
guided by the meanderings of the eponymous Devon river. A three-
year project in the research and writing, its richly textured narrative
encompasses a range of voices – from poachers and milk workers
to swimmers and canoeists; from the human and historic to the
natural and mythic – exploding the contained forms of her early
poems into a free-flowing and garrulous work. But as the poet
Michael Longley has noted, alongside the many voices Oswald
“maintains a personal melody”, and it is this democratic yet
cohesive approach, coupled with her playfulness, rhythmical
prowess, and the presence of an inquisitive intelligence, which
lends her poetry its wide appeal.

In her sixth book of poetry, Memorial, a special extract from which

can be heard here, Oswald draws on her classical education and
longstanding fascination with the oral tradition – tales told rather
than written – to produce a mesmeric reworking of the world’s
greatest war story: Homer’s Iliad. Yet where most critics have
praised, and most translators have sought to capture, what Matthew
Arnold called the poem’s “nobility”, Oswald’s version abandons its
narrative – the wrath of Achilles – approaching instead what ancient
critics called its “enargeia”, or “bright unbearable reality”. The result
is a darkly atmospheric poem which flits between biographical
laments for the many war-dead and soaring, dramatic similes; “an
antiphonal account”, as Oswald states in her introduction, “of man
in his world”. Throughout, the unflinching, plain realism of the
former – “DIORES son of Amarinceus / Struck by a flying flint / Died
in a puddle of his own guts / Slammed down into mud he lies” – is
often as gripping as the elemental blaze of the latter – “Like the
hawk of the hills the perfect killer / Easily outflies the clattering dove
/ She dips away but he follows he ripples / He hangs his black
hooks over her” – blending the human and the workings of nature to
remarkable, incantatory effect.

Oswald’s reading of the poem brings it to life. Her deft shifts in

volume, pace and tone convey each line’s meaning, suggestion and
weight, while segues between biographies and similes become
dizzyingly visual, like cinematic jump cuts. But perhaps most
importantly, as an epic poem intended to be
heard, Memorial captures the Iliad’s ability to astound and engross:
as if the listener were part of a rapt audience, sat with Oswald
around a glowing campfire.

In ‘Interview with the Wind’, published in  The Guardian during May 2009, its speaker
says, ‘I think of the Wind as the Earth’s voice muscle, / Very twisted and springy’.

The poem continues: ‘Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously / It inhales for a while and
then describes by means of breath / Some kind of grief, what is it?’ The wind is finally
envisioned as a ‘huge, hushed up, / Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister’, of whom
it asks: ‘is she serious?’ One might call this charmingly enigmatic, and characteristic of
Alice Oswald, a poet remarkable for her personifications of Nature, giving its many
voices full play. She draws not only upon acute observations of birds, beasts, and
flowers in landscapes, but also upon their topography, history, human inhabitants and
spiritual dimensions. If this makes her work sound high-minded, it’s also delightfully
eccentric, highly rhythmical – she often uses G.M. Hopkins’ sprung rhythms –and
humanely sympathetic to her subjects.

Oswald is best known for Dart (2002), her book-length poem that won the T.S. Eliot
prize. This is a complex and richly polyphonic work, probably best appreciated after a
look at her earlier publications, which began with The Thing in the Gap Stone
Wall (1996). She was (and remains by occupation) a gardener poet, whose workday jobs
informed her poems and a self-portrait of herself ‘With a task and a rake, / with a clay-
slow boot and a yellow mack (‘Pruning in Frost’). There’s also a Stanley Spencer-like
vision of ‘Gardeners at the Resurrection’, or 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 sea and estuaries provide settings for skilfully
metaphysical sonnets, while the book concludes with the water-borne legendary voices
of ‘The Wise Men of Gotham’. Oswald likened her poetic method then as being like dry-
stone walling, ‘finding discrete blocks of words and jamming them together to make
something unshakeable’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 1996).

She went on to state that she wanted her next poems to reflect more complexity and
open-endedness, ‘something baroque and growing, more like hawthorn’. This does
look forward to the free-flowing poetry she develops triumphantly for Dart, with the
imaginative focus switching from the garden to the river. It was inspired by the
‘mutterings’ of the River Dart in Devon, and was described by the author (PBS Bulletin,
2002) as ‘a map poem or song line’ whose structure comes from the river, its
transitions being geographical not rational. The documentary element is based on
numerous interviews with people who live and work along the river, whose stories
dissolve in and out of a plethora of voices – human, mythic, even industrial – and poetic
forms. It has been most often compared to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, for its
rhythmic and vocal complexity (though it isn’t a play and doesn’t have Thomas’ broad
humour). Michael Longley, chair of the T.S. Eliot prize judges, aptly remarked that ‘its
intermingling of poetry and prose feels natural, rhythmically inevitable’.

What we find within is an amazingly rich collection of incident and imagery, dexterously
assembled and always interesting. It contains, the author pointed out, ‘a rush of selves’
as well as ‘a stronghold of other life forms’. It has some truly beautiful visionary lines:
‘And then I saw the river’s dream-self walk / Down to the ring mesh 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’. The natural world of ‘Large Blue Butterflies’
breeding and ‘frogs singing lovesongs’ is alive. This is no idyll, however. Perhaps
recalling long-time Devon resident Ted Hughes, one voice describes a heron whose
‘wings were the width of the river, / I saw it eat an eel alive / and the eel chewed its way
back inside out / through the heron’s stomach’. Having opened with an old man on
Dartmoor, the work ends with ‘water’s soliloquy’ which contains ‘All names, all voices,
Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, / … Driving my many selves from cave to cave’.

Introducing the poems in Woods etc (2005), Oswald observed they had ‘emerged, one
excitement at a time’ over eight years and that ‘quite a few’ actually pre-
dated Dart. These are lyrical poems about Nature, but also about the divine in Nature;
‘Tree Ghosts’, ‘Song of a Stone’ and the prayers of seagulls: ‘O God the featherer, / lift
us if we fall, / preserve the frenzy in our mouths, / the yellow star in the eyeball’
(‘Seabird’s Blessing’). Another meditation on birdsong sees it as assembling the earth
‘out of nine notes and silence’, as ‘it gathers the big bass silence of clouds / and the
mind whispering in its shell’. The trees and their leaves form a kind of natural theology,
‘the thick reissuing starlike shapes / of cells and pores and water-rods / which builds
up, which becomes a pressure, / a gradual fleshing out of a longing for light’ (‘Leaf’).
The human takes its place in the cosmic scheme of things, as on ‘Easternight, the
mind’s midwinter’, when its narrator stands in the ‘soaking darkness’ of a big field
behind the house: ‘and for a moment, this high field unhorizoned / hung upon
nothing’.

With her most recent works, Oswald respectively returns to her favourite river scenario
and charmingly personifies wild flowers and weeds. Like Dart, A Sleepwalk on the
Severn (2009) is based on interviews she conducted with the people associated with the
river, and effectively choreographs their voices. As the title suggests, a dream-like
atmosphere is summoned up, taking place at night over five phases of the Moon. It
accompanies the narrator in tracking over the estuary, observing its ‘reedy lay-by’ and
wading birds with ‘white napkins’. This narrative sweep and eerie nocturnal realm is in
contrast to the small-scale vignettes of Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009). In this book of
light-hearted poems (and fine etchings by her friend Jessica Greenman), we are
introduced to ‘rootless misfits, half-flower half-human’ such as Fragile Glasswort (‘last
seen in the marshes / standing in gumboots, weeping huge, mud-troubled splashes’)
and Narcissus: ‘a variable man-woman of the verges, / wearing the last self-image I
was left with’. There’s also Snowdrop, with ‘her wild-flower sense of wounded
gentleness’, while Scarious Chickweed is ‘a little freakish man / escaping from the
dark’.         

                            

Alice Oswald once claimed she was ‘not a nature poet, though I do write about the
special nature of what happens to exist’ (PBS Bulletin, Spring 1996). More than a decade
on into her career, we can perhaps accept the poetic truth of this. She certainly is a
special kind of poet – re-imagining Nature’s contemporary aspects in truly original
ways.