Falling Awake

"There are similar themes and landscapes to Towers’s, but Oswald is a much more expansive writer; she’s got a kind of searching, questing way of writing about dawn, rain, rivers, the underground; I felt like they were prayers in some way, or vigils – acts of vigil – especially her long poem about dawn. I read somewhere that she got up every day to see the dawn for months and you really get that sense of careful, paying attention – there’s a tenacity and commitment to detail in her work. I love all of Alice Oswald’s collections – you always know you’re going to get a great sequence of poems from her but I thought this one was a real tour de force . It’s a vivid and exciting book. I remember hearing the poem “Dunt” years ago, I saw her read it aloud, and so I could imagine her reading the new collection – there’s a real fidelity to voice and the breath in her work. Absolutely, and it goes back to this artificial divide between so-called performance and page-poetry. I think of someone like Alice Oswald as a real performance poet, actually, because when you hear her read, the breaths and the pauses, the hearing it in her voice, are so crucial. And I think these are poems that deserve to be heard aloud as well as read on the page, quietly to yourself. There’s a real quietness to them, too. There’s a poem early on about badgers that is extraordinary in that way – you really feel like you’re in an underground world. And when she writes about rain you feel as though you’re somehow a part of the fall of the rain but you’re still with it as it seeps into the ground. She’s very good at taking the reader on a journey and seeing it through to its conclusion. When you read Alice Oswald – and I’m sure this is her achievement – you never feel as though she is ever lost for ways to approach landscape. Which is comforting – it makes me excited about trying to do that myself. I read this around the same time that I was reading her Memorial: An excavation of the ‘Iliad’ (2011), and I kept thinking about how deftly she does that, how she connects these very… delicate, almost – delicate but tough – ways of describing landscape, always with a sense of myth and excitement, I suppose. It’s that idea that stories are inherent in landscape and that landscape has a memory that’s much longer than ours. It was interesting to read those two alongside each other."