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Woods etc.
Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third book of poems, and follows on from the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem, Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2002. The poems in her new book compress this uniquely ruminative voice into a dazzlingly various sequence of lyrics about the natural order and the individual life within. 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.
64 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2005
About the author
Alice Oswald
29 books219 followersAlice Oswald (born 1966) is a British poet who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
February 15, 2018
If you have never fallen heart over head for a poet, you may not know the delight of reading a poem you want to memorize. I mean, what is a poet anyhow? Alice Oswald appears to be that thing, for me.
The title poem begins mid-thought, and a title “Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening” glazes our eyes as we picture it. Then came an alphabet primer in the form of a ballad with foot notes, called “Tree Ghosts,” written as a memorial to Clifford Harris, a lifelong forester at Dartington Woods, on the Dartington Estate in southern Devon, run through by the River Dart.
The River Dart
Oswald won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002 for poems collected in a book called Dart. When I encountered Memorial, Oswald’s book interpreting Homer’s Iliad, the world I lived in subtly changed. A month and immersion into the ancients later, I learned that Oswald gave a memorized recitation of the book--the entire book--in Edinburgh. So began my thralldom. Her book Falling Awake, is similarly memorable.
I was once a man. Very tired.This slim collection, called Woods etc. is so deceptive in its dark green cloth cover. The etc. is tacked on, but the book is certainly at least as much about that, the unspecified other.
Very gone-inwards glaring outwards at the road.
His pusky eyes, his threadbare hair,
feet frozen in his boots, back sore.
—from “Five Fables of a Length of Flesh”
This is the dandelion with its thousand facultiesThis book begins with the sea and ends with the stars. We move quickly from "oscillation endlessly shaken" to being airborne: "We are crowds of seabirds…we are screaming…" Not every poem has a tree but every poem has nature key.
like an old woman taken by the neck
and shaken to pieces
This is the dust-flower flitting away
This is the flower of amnesia.
It has opened its head to the wind,
all havoc and weakness…
—from Head of a Dandelion
The title poem begins mid-thought, and a title “Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening” glazes our eyes as we picture it. Then came an alphabet primer in the form of a ballad with foot notes, called “Tree Ghosts,” written as a memorial to Clifford Harris, a lifelong forester at Dartington Woods, on the Dartington Estate in southern Devon, run through by the River Dart.
The River Dart
Oswald won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002 for poems collected in a book called Dart. When I encountered Memorial, Oswald’s book interpreting Homer’s Iliad, the world I lived in subtly changed. A month and immersion into the ancients later, I learned that Oswald gave a memorized recitation of the book--the entire book--in Edinburgh. So began my thralldom. Her book Falling Awake, is similarly memorable.
March 13, 2017
Every poet goes were a non-poetical soul fears to go. He or she dares to talk about the not-speaken items in a not likely way. Oswald follows though this path during the year and the result are some beautiful poems. Nature has an important role in it all.
Here is one:
In the black gland of the earth
The tiny inkling of a river
Put your ear to the river you hear trees
Put your ear to the trees you hear the widening
Numerical wokings of the river
Right down the lenght of Devon,
Under a milky square of light that keeps quite still
The river slows down and goes on
With storm trash clustered on its branches
And paper unfolding underwater
And pairs of ducks swimming over bright grass among flooded willows
The earth's eye
Looking through the earth 's bones
Carries the moon carries the moon the sun but keeps nothing.
Doesn't it tell you all about a river in autumn?
I 'm already looking forward to her poems 'dart'.
Here is one:
In the black gland of the earth
The tiny inkling of a river
Put your ear to the river you hear trees
Put your ear to the trees you hear the widening
Numerical wokings of the river
Right down the lenght of Devon,
Under a milky square of light that keeps quite still
The river slows down and goes on
With storm trash clustered on its branches
And paper unfolding underwater
And pairs of ducks swimming over bright grass among flooded willows
The earth's eye
Looking through the earth 's bones
Carries the moon carries the moon the sun but keeps nothing.
Doesn't it tell you all about a river in autumn?
I 'm already looking forward to her poems 'dart'.
March 30, 2009
It's not the ostensible subject matter (nature and all that guff) that gets me; it's the way she writes. And no matter how many times I go over her work, examining it sentence by sentence, word by word, I have no idea how she manages to make everything sing so beautifully. Her pacing is second-to-none, her rhythm absolutely masterful. Just wonderful.
April 29, 2021
(2.5) A poet I’d like to enjoy more than I do. This was my third try with her (and second attempt at this particular book), and I did appreciate this volume more than A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Falling Awake. Sea and stones, birds and stars: most of these poems, and certainly the ones I engaged with most, are about the natural world. Two favourites were “Seabird’s Blessing,” with its slant rhymes and alliteration, and “Head of a Dandelion.” But too often I find her verse repetitive and her mythological allusions inaccessible. Something about her style just doesn’t click with me; it’s time to stop dragging myself through her books.
January 22, 2021
Quick moving goddess of the rainbow
You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through
Put your hands
Put your heaven-taken shape down
On the ground. Now. Anywhere
Like a bent- down bough of nothing
A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air
And let there be instantly in its underlight –
At street corners, on swings, out of car windows –
A three-moment blessing for all bridges
May impossible rifts be often delicately crossed
By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank
May the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over
On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain
And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space of drips and echoes
May two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance
And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,
Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing
October 17, 2017
Some of these poems I’d read before, in the Voyager One selection. Most were new to me. Unlike the peerless Falling Awake, this wears its influences a little - poems like Excursion to the Planet Mercury could quite easily slip into Hughes’ Poems for Children without anyone necessarily noticing - but it’s still marvellous. The best poems here are wholly original, rooted in dirt and starstuff. Stars and astronomical imagery abound, in fact. I hope she publishes a new book soon (though there’s a certain Stevie Smith poem that echoes in my head every time I think such a thing about a poor, hard working writer).
April 3, 2021
4 out of 5 stars
I was so glad I picked up this book and I thank my sister for lending it to me. Next poetry collection by the author I'm reading is "Dart".
Happy reading!
I was so glad I picked up this book and I thank my sister for lending it to me. Next poetry collection by the author I'm reading is "Dart".
Happy reading!
October 22, 2011
Alice Oswald was a delightful discovery for me, an extremely modern poet who delicately treats the romance of nature in crystalline verse. This collection is filled with the sensory richness of the English countryside that is so dear to me and gave me that special feeling of not being alone in what I have seen, heard, smelt and felt while out walking in woods etc...
October 6, 2023
unfortunately, i don't think this was for me
October 2, 2022
the way oswald chooses words and places them, wow. a reminder to see poems as carved marble, like the result of a handcrafted technique, in the most literal yet metaphorical sense. beautiful, just fully, deeply beautiful, and so clever too.
January 11, 2008
Woods, etc., like its predecessor, Dart, is not just informed by nature but dominated by it: stone, dandelion, planets, animals, seasons, moon, stars, and sea, are each topics. So are bridges, canoes, and children—intersects with nature. Oswald is more complex and brilliant than Mary Oliver, more lyrical and balanced than Ted Hughes. She writes like an angel: “the first whisper of stars is a faint thing / a candle sound, too far away to read by” and “And on Sunday he dreamed he was flying / and his mind grew gold watching the moon / and he began to sing to the brink of speaking” and “Please realize, friends, Time is moving in this neighborhood. / This is Dawn, the unspeakable iridescence of all swiftness, / impatiently brushing past, be quick…”
April 19, 2017
Though not as strong as her previous book, the long poem, Dart, this is a very beautiful and earthy collection, full of finely conceived poems. Many poets I read write work that is in some ways excellent, but I can think of no other modern poet who writes with the timelessness of Alice Oswald. When I read these collection, I know these poems will remain as fresh and as memorable in 100 years as they are now.
In these poems, Oswald writes about stones, the feelings, lives and movement of stones, about stars and our human experience of stars, about woods and the loss of woods. Her work is lively and so full of movement, and I love her style -- the internal rhyme, the fluidity, the sense that every poem expresses itself in the best possible way.
In these poems, Oswald writes about stones, the feelings, lives and movement of stones, about stars and our human experience of stars, about woods and the loss of woods. Her work is lively and so full of movement, and I love her style -- the internal rhyme, the fluidity, the sense that every poem expresses itself in the best possible way.
June 10, 2009
Read Oswald's Danaides. You'll never look back.
July 12, 2016
I taught myself how to read poetry.
November 13, 2020
“[...]
Entonces qué entonces qué os diré entonces qué: un anochecer
estaba yo allí de pie en el mundo de coches de juguete de la infancia
y vi las estrellas caer directamente por los prismáticos de Jimmy,
parecían tan extrañas ensartadas en un instante fugaz.
Luego una y otra vez hasta quizá cien veces
vinieron a introducirme de nuevo por los pies en la nada
incluidas todas mis esperanzas perdidas; a la mañana siguiente
todavía seguía allí aquel zumbido monótono.
El mismo zumbido monótono de siempre que o bien es
mi cinta rebobinando de nuevo o bien son quizá estrellas
que pasan estrellas que regresan a sus últimos lugares conocidos,
porque hasta donde yo sé al final los dos sonidos son iguales.”
(De «Los recuerdos salpicados de barro de una mujer que vivió su vida hacia atrás»)
No todos los poemas de Oswald me fascinan (algunos ni siquiera me gustan demasiado), pero aquellos que sí lo hacen... uf. Algunas imágenes me descolocan profundamente, y aprovecha el lenguaje poético para hacer unas maniobras con los tropos narrativos que... uf (bis).
Solo una cosa: la traducción. He visto decisiones dignas de estudio (o cremación).
Entonces qué entonces qué os diré entonces qué: un anochecer
estaba yo allí de pie en el mundo de coches de juguete de la infancia
y vi las estrellas caer directamente por los prismáticos de Jimmy,
parecían tan extrañas ensartadas en un instante fugaz.
Luego una y otra vez hasta quizá cien veces
vinieron a introducirme de nuevo por los pies en la nada
incluidas todas mis esperanzas perdidas; a la mañana siguiente
todavía seguía allí aquel zumbido monótono.
El mismo zumbido monótono de siempre que o bien es
mi cinta rebobinando de nuevo o bien son quizá estrellas
que pasan estrellas que regresan a sus últimos lugares conocidos,
porque hasta donde yo sé al final los dos sonidos son iguales.”
(De «Los recuerdos salpicados de barro de una mujer que vivió su vida hacia atrás»)
No todos los poemas de Oswald me fascinan (algunos ni siquiera me gustan demasiado), pero aquellos que sí lo hacen... uf. Algunas imágenes me descolocan profundamente, y aprovecha el lenguaje poético para hacer unas maniobras con los tropos narrativos que... uf (bis).
Solo una cosa: la traducción. He visto decisiones dignas de estudio (o cremación).
November 2, 2022
“..consciousness seems to have rendered me homeless in the world/ mi propia conciencia parece haberme dejado huérfana, desconcertada, extrañada de este mundo.”
first lesson que aprendes de Alice Oswald: tiendete ante la ternura de las piedras, los rios y las cosas que crecen marchitándose y decrecen renaciendo.
la mitología privada que aplico al mundo me lanza en mil direcciones, otras veces, me enraiza junto a las propias cosas como si lo único que nos separa fuera un espejo de agua blanda. mato las sensaciones endémicas de recuerdos fuera del alcance de la vista, como un segundo entramado de venas y bronquios que respira como piedras dormidas al fondo del agua. el vínculo primario sana la separación, y me doy cuenta de que si “dios está en todas las cosas”, también cabe en una sola flor.
/…and this is the flower of no property
the wind-bitten dandelion
like when Osiris
blows his scales and weighs the soul with a feather.
(HEAD OF DANDELION)
first lesson que aprendes de Alice Oswald: tiendete ante la ternura de las piedras, los rios y las cosas que crecen marchitándose y decrecen renaciendo.
la mitología privada que aplico al mundo me lanza en mil direcciones, otras veces, me enraiza junto a las propias cosas como si lo único que nos separa fuera un espejo de agua blanda. mato las sensaciones endémicas de recuerdos fuera del alcance de la vista, como un segundo entramado de venas y bronquios que respira como piedras dormidas al fondo del agua. el vínculo primario sana la separación, y me doy cuenta de que si “dios está en todas las cosas”, también cabe en una sola flor.
/…and this is the flower of no property
the wind-bitten dandelion
like when Osiris
blows his scales and weighs the soul with a feather.
(HEAD OF DANDELION)
July 17, 2021
"may we come to the exact place and say so instantly, among a / flash of flowers and the green shell song trees etcetera / ...you whose beauty is only approximately its long and wishing reach" (40)
I enjoyed Hymn to Iris, Poem for Carrying a Baby out of the Hospital, Seabird's Blessing ("O sky count us not as nothing"), Danaides, and Ideogram for Green. There were some lyrical moments very reminiscent of Mary Oliver, but, overall, I struggled to connect. Still, this was a lovely outdoor read.
"All in one brief winter's day, both / braced for confusion with much shy joy, / reversed our vows, unringed our hands / and slid them back into our pockets God knows why" (47).
I enjoyed Hymn to Iris, Poem for Carrying a Baby out of the Hospital, Seabird's Blessing ("O sky count us not as nothing"), Danaides, and Ideogram for Green. There were some lyrical moments very reminiscent of Mary Oliver, but, overall, I struggled to connect. Still, this was a lovely outdoor read.
"All in one brief winter's day, both / braced for confusion with much shy joy, / reversed our vows, unringed our hands / and slid them back into our pockets God knows why" (47).
September 26, 2022
“First your voice and then the rustling ceasing.
The last glow of rain dead in the ground”
The last glow of rain dead in the ground”
February 23, 2024
4.5 - brilliant, inventive observations and meditations on the world. The more recent 'Falling awake' is even more exceptional (5/5). One of my favourite new-to-me poets.
June 12, 2023
It’s always so hard to “rate” poetry. Some of the ones in this collection were little wonders, which I expect from Oswald; others, however, and indeed the majority of them, I wasn’t able to connect with or entirely comprehend. Nonetheless, her writing style is always a sparkling river to ride upon.
October 3, 2013
May two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance
Thanks to a friend's research interests, I'm now keenly aware of the distinctions we draw between the human and non-human, and the subtle to straightforward ways we go about privileging the former in conversation as well as action. So, while Woods etc. may not have moved me as much as I had hoped or expected, while it may have seemed a bit more erratic than Oswald's earlier work, this collection is also a deeply interesting, thought-provoking read.
may we come to know that the length of water is not quite the same as the passing of time
I tend to think of poetry as an exercise in humanity — one that travels a very individual path but resonates with shared human insight and experience. What fascinates me about Oswald is how thoroughly, how joyously, she inhabits the non-human, which turns out to be unexpectedly (is it so startling, though?) humane. In "Five Fables of a Length of Flesh," for instance, she moves from the body of a man to a ferret, a frog, an ass, a sheep, changing gender, changing form, changing voice — and yet not changing, not so much that she becomes unrecognizable. Here she simply makes her habitation of other minds and bodies more explicit, more explicitly beautiful. She draws the familiar out of the foreign, and it's magic.
Woods etc. contains many highlights: lyrics, lines, luminous turns of phrase, ideas that pierce and beckon. Entire poems, entire worlds. "Walking Past a Rose this June Morning," "Story of a Man," "A Star Here and a Star There." My favorite is a list. How strange. How perfect.
Various Portents
Various stars. Various kings.
Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights.
Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers.
Much cold, much overbearing darkness.
Various long midwinter Glooms.
Various Solitary and Terrible Stars.
Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers.
Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.
More than one North Star, more than one South Star.
Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems,
Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark,
Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.
Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens,
All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes:
Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk,
Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost...
Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes,
Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness,
Various 5,000-year-old moon maps,
Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille.
Various gods making beautiful works in bronze,
Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains,
And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar.
Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather.
Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers,
Watchers of wisps of various glowing spindles,
Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac,
Seafarers tossing, tied to a star...
Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights.
Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall.
Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening
Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.
October 27, 2023
It can be tempting to rush through Alice Oswald’ as poems, because a lot of them have a quick, provisional quality to them, and often use repetition, but I’m glad I re-read this one more slowly. There are some absolute bangers here, like Another Westminster Bridge and River, and great weird ones like The mud spattered recollections of the woman who lived her life backwards and Various Portents. There are a couple that left me cold and/or baffled, and Oswald has a tendency to overuse certain ‘poetic’ words like ‘light’ or ‘glimpse’ or ‘glint’, but the strongest poems more than make up for that. There are a lot of poems about very simple, banal things like leaves falling and water flowing, but the high-powered language brings drama and emotion to well worn subject matter.
December 2, 2015
This is the first collection of Alice Oswald's work that I have read and overall I really liked it. I enjoy poetry about nature, which this volume focuses on; and I like poetry that has a quirky element to it, which the majority of these poems do. Poems I particularly enjoyed were 'The mud-spattered recollections...', 'Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening', 'Head of a Dandelion', 'Walking past a Rose...' and 'Song of a Stone'. I will definately read more of Oswald's work.
January 31, 2017
Poems that are very poemy. Don't get them. There was one about going into a cafe and getting a drink then realising there was a boat in it and a bit of a storm brewing. I thought it was finally a poem in the book that I might enjoy somewhat. Then it ends with a couple of lines about a fat girl playing on the stairs. Don't get it.
March 26, 2009
I enjoyed all of these poems, and really loved some of them. Oswald has a real gift for animating the inanimate. Some of the imagery is to die for.
January 23, 2016
This is the poetry I wish I could write. I love the layers of meaning in landscape.
September 28, 2013
Absolutely love some of these poems. They are beautiful and easy to read.
March 17, 2014
Some of the best poetry I've read in a very long time.
March 16, 2023
beautiful, romantic, unsentimental portrayal of nature.
October 22, 2022
'A spiral ascending the morning, / climbing by means of a song into the sun, / to be sung reciprocally by two birds at intervals / in the same tree but not quite in time. / A song that assembles the earth / out of nine notes and silence. / out of the unformed gloom before dawn / where every tree is a problem to be solved by birdsong.'
//
[see review for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile]
Again, Oswald's form assumes a pre-dawn 'unformed gloom' of silence, which serves as the bedrock upon which intermittent, reciprocal, co-constituent sounds build the texture of reality.
But something worth touching on is the attention Oswald pays in this particular 2005 collection to the work of listening. Oswald has spoken variously elsewhere about exemplar instruments of the attentive work she values as the precursor-process to writing poetry: in her introduction to The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet, she explores the etymology of 'rake' in Devon dialect – the 'dew's harp' – and thus places importance on the rake as a means of 'connect[ing] the earth to our hands' by means of its rhythmic sound; in her early essay 'The Universe in the Time of Rain Makes the World Alive with Noise', she finds similar need of the spade, as 'when digging you become bodily implicated in the ground's world', and the 'spade's language' is one of 'speak[ing] in short lines of trochees and dactyls: sscrunch turn slot slot, sscrunch turn slot slot'.
In a Heideggerian manner, the spade and rake become a transhuman extension – expansion – of the body; they become limbs as natural as arms, or other sensoria. Ears, too, function in this way, and listening becomes a sort of 'reaching out' – indeed, a reaching out into data too acute to be picked up by the eye. Oswald notes: 'The ear hears into, not just what surrounds it.'
In Woods etc, Oswald 'walks by earsight'. In the eponymous poem, the speaker remembers 'walking once into increasing / woods, my hearing like a widening wound'; all is tied together in the mind by the 'constant beat' of the speaker's own footfall, 'sweeping together the loose tacks of sound'; listening, here, and insodoing the constituting of space, is with no shyness presented as a venturing out – an expenditure of some particular effort. 'Field', coming midway through the collection, is, itself, a preeminent example of the poetry's Work: one 'easternight', the speaker '[stands] in the big field behind the house / at the centre of all visible darkness', and through this reaching out with the ear, through this conscious attentiveness, a world is slowly, accretively built out of this darkness. A world 'wedged / between its premise and its conclusion' is dislodged, and birthed as something with mass, with texture, with voice: 'for a moment, this high field unhorizoned / hung upon nothing, barking for its owner.' By the final verses, we are left, listening along with the speaker – we have ourselves been bodily implicated in the Work of the poem: 'burial, widowed, moonless, seeping / docks, grasses, small windflowers, weepholes, wires.'
//
[see review for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile]
Again, Oswald's form assumes a pre-dawn 'unformed gloom' of silence, which serves as the bedrock upon which intermittent, reciprocal, co-constituent sounds build the texture of reality.
But something worth touching on is the attention Oswald pays in this particular 2005 collection to the work of listening. Oswald has spoken variously elsewhere about exemplar instruments of the attentive work she values as the precursor-process to writing poetry: in her introduction to The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet, she explores the etymology of 'rake' in Devon dialect – the 'dew's harp' – and thus places importance on the rake as a means of 'connect[ing] the earth to our hands' by means of its rhythmic sound; in her early essay 'The Universe in the Time of Rain Makes the World Alive with Noise', she finds similar need of the spade, as 'when digging you become bodily implicated in the ground's world', and the 'spade's language' is one of 'speak[ing] in short lines of trochees and dactyls: sscrunch turn slot slot, sscrunch turn slot slot'.
In a Heideggerian manner, the spade and rake become a transhuman extension – expansion – of the body; they become limbs as natural as arms, or other sensoria. Ears, too, function in this way, and listening becomes a sort of 'reaching out' – indeed, a reaching out into data too acute to be picked up by the eye. Oswald notes: 'The ear hears into, not just what surrounds it.'
In Woods etc, Oswald 'walks by earsight'. In the eponymous poem, the speaker remembers 'walking once into increasing / woods, my hearing like a widening wound'; all is tied together in the mind by the 'constant beat' of the speaker's own footfall, 'sweeping together the loose tacks of sound'; listening, here, and insodoing the constituting of space, is with no shyness presented as a venturing out – an expenditure of some particular effort. 'Field', coming midway through the collection, is, itself, a preeminent example of the poetry's Work: one 'easternight', the speaker '[stands] in the big field behind the house / at the centre of all visible darkness', and through this reaching out with the ear, through this conscious attentiveness, a world is slowly, accretively built out of this darkness. A world 'wedged / between its premise and its conclusion' is dislodged, and birthed as something with mass, with texture, with voice: 'for a moment, this high field unhorizoned / hung upon nothing, barking for its owner.' By the final verses, we are left, listening along with the speaker – we have ourselves been bodily implicated in the Work of the poem: 'burial, widowed, moonless, seeping / docks, grasses, small windflowers, weepholes, wires.'
Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews