When I interviewed Oswald in 2012, she was compelling in everything she said, but it was only when I came to transcribe our conversation later that I realised she had spoken not only in full, delicately constructed sentences, but in entire off-the-cuff paragraphs of pristine prose.  In speech, her mind is finely geared to the way her words will come out on paper, but you can tell that she writes first by speaking, listening and thinking. When you read Oswald, it’s hard to resist imagining how her poems would sound aloud. They expand far beyond paper.  “I do very much believe in poetry as a kind of tune or music,” she said to me then, as we discussed her forthcoming performance of the book-length 2011 poem Memorial, an elegiac list of the 200 soldiers who die in the Iliad, embellished with Homer’s similes. The epithets make each warrior a more rounded character, a life easy to mourn: “SCAMANDRIUS the hunter/ Knew every deer in the woods”.  Oswald performed Memorial from memory, in its entirety, on several occasions. It was a visibly exhausting tour-de-force. She said: “In a kind of superstitious way, I feel that for those names actually to be sounded out loud is even more than for them to be written on a page. It’s a kind of giving of life back to those people.” This is poetry that works like a spell.  Although Falling Awake is a collection rather than a single, book-length poem – the form she used for Dart and Memorial, and which has brought her greatest acclaim – it does contain one extraordinary extended piece, “Tithonus”.  In Greek myth, the dawn (Eos) fell in love with Tithonus, a man, and asked the gods to make him immortal. She forgot to specify eternal youth. Tithonus did indeed live forever, but became enfeebled and senseless, and had to be locked away.  Oswald’s poem imagines Tithonus meeting the dawn at midsummer. It was written to be heard in initial darkness, the lights coming on very slowly. In 2014, Oswald performed it at the Southbank Centre and it lasted 46 minutes, the length of a midsummer dawn.  “Tithonus” is a poem about youth, age, folly and the unstoppable mechanisms of the natural world that mark out our time on Earth: “as for the sparrows I’ve been/ watching them embroider their/ indecisions in brown stitches until/ the whole valley is darned/ then leaving their dusty jackets on/ the ground/ and then another life and then another”. Even on paper it’s hypnotic.  “Tithonus” is an astonishing achievement and the most powerful piece in Falling Awake, coming at its end. But an obsession with dawn and twilight pervades the rest of the collection, hinting at death’s omnipresence in nature and in folklore. Oswald’s masterful telling of Tithonus’s life is the culmination of that argument, the man’s life robbed of meaning by his inability to die.  Throughout Falling Awake, the hours and the seasons, as well as the insistent course of river currents, are felt as the internal rhythms of the poetry. Everything in Oswald’s work pulses with these adopted natural rhythms. We find Orpheus in this collection, too, his severed head floating away down the River Hebron, a metaphor for Oswald’s writing: “my voice being water/ which holds me together and also carries me away”.  Here we also find “Dunt: A poem for a dried-up river”, which won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007. Oswald takes a statue of a Roman water nymph, found near the Dunt’s banks, as the starting point of her attempt to conjure the dried-up Gloucestershire river back into existence: “she tries to summon a river out of limestone”. It is meditative, repetitive and about as earthy a river poem as you’re likely to find – and a long way from a Romantic river sonnet.  It asks: what happens to a river when there is no water? What do you find in the depths of its bed? A river without much water starts to defy definition: “It’s a pitiable likeness of clear running/struggling to keep up with what’s already gone”. The poem is a coda to Dart, and though just as mesmerising, it’s blunter, shorter and uglier. It doesn’t progress easily, getting caught in its own repetitions, and has to be urged on with the refrain: “try again”.  Another outstanding poem in the book is “Fox”, a response to Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”. Oswald, like the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, is an admirer of Hughes. In 2014, she edited a volume of his animal poems, an exercise that left her with “an unusual brightness behind my eyes”, as she wrote in the preface. Although she felt that all the poems were “prayers to language itself”, she paid particular attention to “The Thought-Fox”, a poem that imagines encountering a fox at midnight (“cold, delicately as the dark snow/ A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;/ Two eyes serve a moment”). It explores the conflict in a poet between wildness and restraint, and the dark art of pinning an idea down to paper.  Oswald’s “Fox” takes place at the same time of day, but slinks down the page even more foxily: “a fox in her fox-fur/ stepping across/ the grass in her black gloves/ barked at my house… ” Her final stanza is as honest and vulnerable as a fox’s cry: “… it’s midnight/ and my life/ is laid beneath my children/ like gold leaf”. The “fox in her fox-fur” must dance the line between being sinuous and surviving.  The fox is now female. Oswald describes her as “a woman with a man’s voice”. And when poets mention voice, you pay attention. Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox” is about writing poetry, and so is Oswald’s pointedly feminine creature. That Oswald looks directly at gender in “Fox” comes as a tantalising surprise, because it isn’t her way, even though she has made career of writing powerfully about earth, strength and physicality – tropes many poets would earmark as masculine.
Review of Falling Awake by Alice Oswald 'I want to work out what it’s like to descend/ out of the dawn’s mind/ and find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown/ with a liquid cufflink/ and then unfasten”.