Alice Oswald's 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 life's 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 it's spoken as well as how it's 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.
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It is the story of the falling rain / to turn into a leaf and fall again / it is the secret of a summer shower /to steal the light and hide in a flower - A SHORT STORY OF FALLING
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(Jonathan Cape, 1 January 2016, paperback, 96 pages, bought AmazonUK)
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I don't remember how I came about having a copy of Falling Awake as I'd not heard of the poet before. I don't remember much about the first time I read this poetry collection a few years ago. It's a nice volume, quite thick for poetry. I like the binding and the cover. It's nice to pick up and flick through the pages. I enjoyed all of the poems in this collection. They are well-written and engaging and I liked the imagery and range of themes. My favourite poem is also the longest, Tithonus which is seeped in mythology. I loved this poem. I also especially liked A Short Story of Falling, Body, Two Voices and Aside. I'd recommend this.
