Alice Oswald

'Mesmeric' - "Sunday Times". 'Oswald has soul in riverfuls' - "Guardian". Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in "Dart" a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. Alice Oswald read classics at Oxford, trained as a gardener and now lives in Devon with her husband and their two sons. "Dart" is her second collection. Her first, "The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile", won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her most recent collection is Woods etcetera.

Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices, drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Using conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon as a poetic census, Alice Oswald creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are varied and idiomatic - poacher, ferryman, sewage worker, mill worker, forester and swimmers.

Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize. A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Alice Oswalds poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability - a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality - is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and lifes losing struggle with the gravity of nature. Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as its spoken as well as how its thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours - goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time - are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.

Aquesta és una traducció de l'atmosfera de la_ Ilíada_. Oswald s'immergeix en el text homèric per despullar-lo de la narrativa -la ira d'Aquil·les, la història d'Helena- i sortir-ne amb un poema que

Aquesta és una traducció de l’atmosfera de la Ilíada. Oswald s’immergeix en el text homèric per despullar-lo de la narrativa -la ira d’Aquil·les, la història d’Helena- i sortir-ne amb un poema que vo

This is a book-length poem a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswalds work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICEThe Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswalds first collection of poems, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice. Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the book introduced readers to her meditative, intensely musical style, and her breath-taking gift for visionary writing.The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr . . . a fresh and exciting first collection. Kathleen Jamie, Times Literary Supplementan inspired debut of lightly-worn wisdom and verbal panache. John FullerAlice Oswald throws the windows of the imagination open; she places a fingertip on the pulse of tradition, and proves it is still very much alive.The Times

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Weeds and Wild Flowers is a magical meeting of the poems of Alice Oswald and the etchings of Jessica Greenman. Within its pages everyday flora take on an extraordinary life, jostling tragically at times, at times comically, for a foothold in a busying world. Stunningly visualised and skilfully animated, this imaginative collaboration beckons us toward a landscape of botanical characters, and invites us to see ourselves among them.

This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem, which was written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us - its effect on water and its effect on voices. Alice OswaldA Sleepwalk on the Severn is a poem for several voices, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead - all based on real people from the Severn catchment - talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. Commissioned for the 2009 festival of the Severn, Alice Oswalds breathtakingly original new work aims to record what happens when the moon moves over the sublunary world: its effect on water and its effect on language.

Woods etc. is Alice Oswalds third collection of poems, and follows the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem Dart, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Extending the concerns of Dart and written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.

La hoja que sigue haciéndose en su pérula, el susurro de las cosas oculto en el interior, el latido de las ramas muertas. El lento flujo que alimenta una forma enroscada bajo tierra, hora tras hora la vegetacion que renueva formas estrelladas de celulas y poros y retoños acuaticos, que se acumula, que deriva en una presion, un paulatino modelar de un anhelo de luz, una manita abriendose, tanteando en esa mano todo el sentido del propio ser puesto friamente, el yo provisional, inexplicable en el aire, bailando al contacto con el viento“. Hoja”, de Alice Oswald. Alice Oswald (Inglaterra, 1966), que fue jardinera en el Tapley Park de Devony en el Chelsea Physic Garden de Londres, esta considerada como una de las poetas mas poderosas y singulares de su generacion. En su obra brillan los poemarios Dart (2002, Premio T. S. Eliot), Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009, Premio Ted Hughes), Memorial (2011) y este Woods etc. (2005) que celebramos presentar aqui con el titulo de Bosques, etc., en lo que constituye la primera traduccion de un libro suyo al español.