Fiona Sampson at The Guardian:
The poet Alice Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. She was Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, and her lectures are available online. But this is her first full-length book, and as such is something of an occasion.
So what exactly is it? For a work of prose it contains a lot of poetry, much translated or composed by Oswald herself. Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Ted Hughes also feature. Though nonfiction, the book is full of stories, particularly retellings of Homer and Aeschylus. It is billed as “genre-defying” and there is much formal experimentation. But at heart it is an exploration of the oral tradition, and the writer’s own subtitle is A Manifesto, which feels exciting and urgent, pointed at the contemporary world with its pressing realities. Sure enough, the first chapter invokes both Homer and the spoken word as a living phenomenon, through Oswald’s encounter with a Ukrainian heart transplant recipient who tells her his story; references to David Bowie and Nat King Cole; Catalan folksong; and Badia Obaid, “a still-breathing Mesopotamian storyteller who was born in Baghdad”.
more here.
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