Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald was born in 1966, read Classics at New College, Oxford, and won an Eric Gregory Award for promising poets under 30 in 1994. When her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was published two years later, it won the Forward Prize for best first collection and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

It was as a nature poet that she became famous in 2002 with her book-length poem Dart, which won the TS Eliot Prize. The poem traces the River Dart along its length, through the voices of its people – including its animal, drowned, and historical denizens. Dart also featured myriad voices from nature and the ‘spirit’ world of folklore, and in the foreword, the poet writes, “All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings”. Here, “the dead tin miners speak”:

In 2004 Oswald was named one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets. In 2005, Woods etc. (which explores the same elemental concerns as Dart, in shorter lyric poems) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best poetry collection.

In 2009 two books came out: A Sleepwalk on the Severn, and Weeds and Wildflowers, a collaborative project with the illustrator Jessica Greenman. These poems personify flowers with dark, observant stories about their characters; ‘Scarious Chickweed’ begins:


This book harks back, through the Victorian crazes for ‘the language of flowers’ and ‘flower fairies’, to traditional lore about ancient sprites and other ‘voices’ of the countryside (as in Dart). The collection was awarded the first annual Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Memorial, her most recent work, reshapes Homer’s Iliad. The poem, subtitled “An Excavation of the Iliad”, presents the passages of the original that tell the stories of the fallen Greek soldiers of the Trojan War.


Oswald created a stir when she withdrew the book from the TS Eliot Prize shortlist in 2012, in protest against its new hedge fund sponsor – an act of conscience in keeping with a particularly English radical tradition, recalling poets like William Blake and John Clare.

Memorial features a device which repeats some lines, like a refrain, for each warrior; this was controversial in the reviews when it came out, and it works best when read aloud. Like the installation artist Francis Alÿs, who also deals in in-betweens and unseens, Alice Oswald is a walker, and has said that she memorises her poems – and even drafts them out in her mind – while walking. Shortly after the TS Eliot Prize, Oswald recited the whole poem at London’s Southbank Centre, standing at a lectern with no book for an hour and a half.

The novelist Jeanette Winterson has said of her:

Oswald trained as a gardener, writes the nature column for the New Statesman, and lives on the Dartington Estate in Devon with her playwright husband and three children. 
Bibliography

Editor, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (Faber and Faber, London, 2006)
The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile (Faber and Faber, London, 2007)
Woods etc. (Faber and Faber, London, 2008)
Sir Thomas Wyatt: Poems Selected by Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber, London, 2008)
Weeds and Wildflowers, illustrated by Jessica Greenman (Faber and Faber, London, 2009)
A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Faber and Faber, London, 2009)
Dart (Faber and Faber, London, 2010)
Memorial (Faber and Faber, London, 2012)

Links

Oswald’s author page at Faber
Oswald’s page at the Poetry Archive
Oswald’s page at the British Council
Jeanette Winterson discusses Oswald
Oswald on Homer and the Iliad at the New Statesman