Falling Awake Poems [Paperback]

[Oswald] writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, Tithonus, may be the most beautiful work I read all year.After having exhausted language once, Oswald has returned to exhaust it again, her own voice speaking over the corpses of the worlds ever-present erosion&and challenging herself and her readers to conceptualize what new shape can come when the last reiterated whip of sparks in the world and its many spheres has gone, and then gone again.[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention.Alice Oswalds poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world.Alice Oswald pulls off a feat in her seventh collection: she finds words for encounters with nature that ordinarily defy language.& [[[A] modern classic.A liminal text.& Unmistakably original.Stunning.& If theres any justice in the poetry world, the title [Poet Laureate] should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again.You wont experience the full effect of Alice Oswalds poetry unless you read her words aloudshe writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions.Winner of the Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize