Falling Awake

by Alice Oswald

Overview

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award • Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize

“These lyrics…illustrate poetry’s unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world.” —Washington Post

Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, “give[s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.

FROM “VERTIGO”
let me shuffle forward
and tell you the two minute life of rain
starting right now
lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355451
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Alice Oswald is the author of eight books of poetry, including Memorial and Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize. Elected as the University of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2019, she lives in Bristol, United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

A Short Story of Falling 1

Swan 2

Flies 4

Fox 5

Severed Head Floating Downriver 6

Cold Streak 11

Body 12

A Rushed Account of the Dew 13

Shadow 14

Village 17

Vertigo 22

Looking Down 24

Alongside Beans 26

A Drink from Cranmere Pool 28

Slowed-Down Blackbird 29

Dunt 31

Two Voices 36

Sunday Ballad 37

You Must Never Sleep under a Magnolia 38

Aside 39

Sz 40

Evening Poem 42

Tithonus 45

And so he goes on 81

Editorial Reviews

"After having exhausted language once, Oswald has returned to exhaust it again, her own voice speaking over the corpses of the world’s ever-present erosion…and challenging herself and her readers to conceptualize what new shape can come when the last reiterated ‘whip of sparks’ in the world and its many spheres has ‘gone,’ and then gone again."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Stunning.… If there’s any justice in the poetry world, the title [Poet Laureate] should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again."

Daily Telegraph

"[A] modern classic."

Sunday Times - Book of the Year

"[Falling Awake] does not disappoint.… Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority."

Guardian

"Alice Oswald pulls off a feat in her seventh collection: she finds words for encounters with nature that ordinarily defy language.… [Falling Awake] is an astonishing book of beauty, intensity and poise—a revelation."

Observer

"Alice Oswald’s poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world."

Poetry Daily

"[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention."

Boston Review

"You won’t experience the full effect of Alice Oswald’s poetry unless you read her words aloud—she writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions."

Bustle

"[Oswald] writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions."

Bustle - Twelve Best Poetry Collections of 2016

"Minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant. . . . [A] perpetual inspiration."

The New Yorker - Best Books of 2016

"Nothing is quite like Oswald’s 'Tithonus.' . . . Extraordinarily intriguing."

Booklist

"Oswald’s choices are subtle at first, as she intermingles stark images — such as a rotting swan — with exquisite writing and inserts characters from Greek mythology into the English countryside. These lyrics, while often dark, illustrate poetry’s unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world."

The Washington Post

"[Oswald] writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, 'Tithonus,' may be the most beautiful work I read all year."

Best Books of Poetry of 2016 - The New Yorker - Dan Chiasson

06/15/2016
In this new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize winner Oswald, life is seen as a continual tumbling downward. Rain "rises to the light and falls again," while elsewhere "clouds close their options and the whole// melancholy air/ surrenders to pure fear and/ falls." A fly falls stunned at the window, a badger falls "like a suitcase" to the shovel, and night falls "as if dropped from a great height." If precipitation permeates these pages (because the author is British?), there's less a sense of dank than edgy foreboding. Even the local village appears less quaint than sinister, and several fablelike poems have a Grimm feel: "Three people in the snow/ getting rid of themselves/ breath by breath// and every six seconds a blackbird." VERDICT With the sparkle of black jewels; for all poetry fans.

Library Journal