Falling Awake by Alice Oswald

Hardcover, 96 pgs, Pub Aug 23rd 2016 by W. W. Norton Company (first published July 7th 2016), ISBN13: 9780393285284, Lit Awards: Costa Book Award for Poetry (2016), T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Nominee (2016), Forward Prize Nominee for Best Collection (2016), Griffin Poetry Prize Nominee for International Shortlist (2017)

I have a new favorite poet and and I can’t stop thinking about her work. But you have to hear her speak the work to get the full impact so therefore below I have attached a video of Oswald reading the first poem in this 2016 collection, called "A Short Story on Falling."

I have learned that this appears to be Oswald's ninth book of poetry, and that her second book, Dart, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. According to her wiki, Oswald "is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence." It is absurd to fall in love with language again, but here I am, helpless in her hands.

Her visualizations are unforgettable. In "You Must Never Sleep Under a Magnolia," we learn of "shriek-mouthed blooms" and the first flowering like a glimpse of flesh. And what of

Old scrap-iron foxgloves
rusty rods of the broken woods

what a faded knocked-out stiffness
as if you'd sprung from the horse-hair
of a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down there...
--from Evening Poem

Or what about "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn" whose characterization of Tithonus reminds us of another babbling old man:

It is said the dawn fell in love with Tithonus
and asked Zeus to make him immortal, but forgot
to ask that he should not grow old. Unable to die,
he grew older and older until at last the dawn
locked him in a room where he still sits babbling
to himself and waiting night after night for her appearance.

As it happens, just when I discovered this unbeatable voice, I learn that she and another newly discovered favorite author, Kei Miller, will be speaking together, in a month, at the same venue in England, as part of the Bath Spa Poetry Series:

It is enough to bring the dead to life. What I wouldn't give to hear these two... ♬♪ If I were a rich man ♬♫

Listen to Oswald reciting her poem, "A Short Story on Falling," from memory:





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