Alice Oswald reading
Tuesday 13 March 2012, 6.30PM
Speaker: Alice Oswald, Author
Writers at York lecture series
Memorial by Alice Oswald
This
glitteringly original new poem from prize-winning poet Alice Oswald retells the
story of Homer’s Iliad.
Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its ‘nobility’, as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its ‘bright unbearable reality’ (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem’s energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer’s extended similes and on the brief ‘biographies’ of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer’s glance.
‘The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt – in the aftermath of the Trojan War – to remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world… compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.’ Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart , her second collection, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc , won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006, and in 2009 she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Sleepwalk On The Severn , a poem for several voices set at night on the Severn Estuary.
From Song of a Stone
there was a woman from the north
picked a stone up from the earth
when the stone began to dream
it was a flower folded in
"What's startling is the sheer bravura, the idiosyncrasy, the uniqueness of the work. It's extremely rooted and almost unfashionably English and rural…’
In her introduction to Weeds and Wild Flowers, she says her hope is "that the experience of reading and looking at the book will be a slightly unsettling pleasure, like walking through a garden at night, when the plants come right up to the edges of their names and beyond them".
‘a gatherer, an amateur, a scavenger, a comber, my whole style’s a stone wall, just wedging together what happens to be lying about at the time’
It is probably not the nature tag itself so much as its shadow, the sense of well-mapped rural cosiness, that puts Oswald on the defensive: the proud transcendentalism of her poems has little in common with the signposted nature trails of some of her contemporaries’ treks to the wilderness.
Location: Bowland auditorium, Berrick Saul building
Admission: Admission is free and open to all