Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald
Alice Oswaldis a British poet from Reading, Berkshire who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
asked awake blue came dawn decision express familiar finally lay poetry pulled relief returning time
One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.
eye dark flames
The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined.
night spiders remakes
Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.
real animal light
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, youll see something of the difference between Homers poetry and anyone elses. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the Iliad, real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
running spring flower
Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.
hands order rivers
I stood looking down through the beech trees. When I threw a stone I could count to five before the splash. Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head, through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm, giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it, water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding. When my body was in some way a wave to swim in, one continuous fin from head to tail, I steered through rapids like a canoe, digging my hands in, keeping just ahead of the river.
real government voice
There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.
bad best examining honest ignore line motive poem whether
That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
both case crowded dangerous greek invoking lament maybe mention name piece poetry
One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.
latin pattern preferred sentence shift word
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.
absolute language natural ownership simply translate weird
I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.
I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate.
believe except poet
I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
people range
There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.