Alice Oswald's Falling Awake's Restless Experimentation

Fiona Sampson reviews Alice Oswald's "eagerly awaited book," Falling Awake, for the Guardian. "Since her crystalline debut, 1996’s The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile," writes Sampson, "she has published two book-length river poems, an album of flower poems, the astonishing performance piece Memorial about Homer’s dead, and just one further, relatively slight 'straight' collection. This restless experimentation has more in common with North American poets such as Claudia Rankine than with anyone else writing in the UK." More:

However, her poetry doesn’t need to resort to innovative genres in order to challenge and engage. When she evokes her “Shadow”, “being dragged along crippled over things as if broken-winged / […] with the flesh parachute of a human opening above it”, Oswald remarks that “it’s as if I’ve interrupted something / that was falling in a straight line from the eye of God”. She notes in passing, and with a phrase that’s characteristically both exact and surprising, “the rooks flying upwards snipping at the clouds”. This is almost laconically done. The poet makes it look so easy you might be lulled into thinking nothing was happening – or at least, nothing more than description.

Yet that swerve into the mythic, “a straight line from the eye of God”, is no whimsy: it’s the poem’s arrival point, earned by the accumulating strangeness of the piece. It also nudges us back to one of this book’s themes, announced by its punning title. There is a lot of falling in Falling Awake. There is also a lot of flight. This counter-theme is introduced in the second poem, an ascension in which a dead swan rises “hurrying away from the plane-crash-mess of her wings”. In “Sz”, meanwhile, a between-seasons breeze is “so barely there / that I can only see you through starlings / whom you try this way and that like an uncomfortable coat”.

Find the full review at the Guardian.