Honarariums

Alice Oswald


As commented by a reviewer,"The freshness and rhythm of Alice Oswald 's work is captivating and wholly new", she is one of the very few exciting and original poets working in the English language today.

Living in south Devon, a few hours of journey from a suburban London in the modest cottage where the poet lives with her husband (the playwright Peter Oswald) and their three children.. Trays of seedlings on the window-sills filled with trays of seedlings and, outside, a hazy blue sky, wood pigeons, garden allotments clustered on a slope where the Oswald children are playing with friends, and the hills beyond.

It's another world "I really think there are," Oswald says that she really thinks there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate. It is a surprisingly tranquil setting for a writer whose work is both complex and forthright, dazzling and tense with linguistic energy.

Three of her four collections have been Poetry Book Society Choices; her second book, Dart, won theTS Eliot Prize; her third, Woods etc., won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2007. Her fans include Carol Ann Duffy and Jeanette Winterson. Last year, she was one of only five poets in a list, compiled by a newspaper's book critics, of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945; she was the youngest writer included.

Alice Oswald is charismatic, like anyone with an intense focus on their art. Diffident, clear-eyed and intelligent, she is prone to insecurity, and her reserve could be mistaken for aloofness.

It might have been tempting to produce variations on Dart, the book-length poem about the Devon river and the people on its margins which incorporated material gathered from interviews. Dart is a counterblast to the linguistically conservative vignette trimmed with images and closing with a wee epiphany, which has dominated British poetry for the past half-century.

Oswald doesn't put pen to paper until the poem has formed in her mind – "I like the body to take part in writing a poem" – and she believes in "a whole poem which I just can't quite hear. It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it." In that spirit, why not read aloud the following lines:

'you can hear water
cooped up in moss and moving
slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut
with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another'

Sound is fundamental to Oswald's poetry, though never, she hopes, at the cost of sense. Negative reviews trouble her, especially if they question her meaning. "I hate not managing to speak clearly," she says, as agitated as she gets during our al fresco conversation. "I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia – like I'm locked in my own head – if what I've said hasn't reached someone."

Nevertheless, Oswald would rather risk unintelligibility while being true to her inspiration.

"People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be."

While Wyatt has influenced her thinking on versification, the writer to whom she feels most indebted is Homer. Still grateful to the teacher at a secondary school where she was the only pupil studying Greek, Oswald went on to take a degree in Classics at Oxford, avoiding the more obvious route for the aspiring writer of an English degree. Ted Hughes, a poet with whom she is routinely compared, was a relatively late (Courtesy:The Guardian)

(This post and the forthcoming ones are dedicated to the makers and modifyers of modern English to retain its beauty and grandeur. So the forthcoming posts would get numbered as Honararium .1 and so..so )