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 Oswald's 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.
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As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind
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(@randomhouse, 5 September 2019, ebook, 74 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I haven't read much by the poet and have been impressed with what I've read. I wasn't sure what to expect when I found out this is a book length poem, not something I've read much of. I needn't have worried. Nobody is structured in a series of one page vignettes which were like little individual poems rather than a continuous chunk of test which I was worried it might be. The poet takes the Odyssey as her springboard for poems about isolation, abandonment and our relationship with water and the sea. I enjoyed the poet's use of imagery, some very powerful at times.
