Alice Oswald at the Edinburgh Book Festival

I frankly think that some poets, reading their own work, have a tendency to spoil it (a poet whose name rhymes with 'fluffy' springs to mind.). They over-express, they over-dramatise, they leave massive pauses, they try to become an actor -- which they conspicuously aren't -- and to make their work into a monologue or verse drama -- which it conspicuously isn't. Poetry, especially lyric poetry, is a voice in a space: either a physical space like a hall, or a white paper-space in a book. It does not actually address anyone. It requires intense attention on the rhythm and focus of the words, and I believe that this should largely replace the need for any 'acting'. (Except perhaps in the dramatic monologue, the deliberate 'cross-over' form, done so beautifully by Robert Browning and Tennyson and co.)

However, sometimes readers of poetry, even actors, manage to get a slow, low, calm intensity that directs the listener's attention straight onto the words, not the reader's voice. Ralph Fiennes' reading of Four Quartets is the perfect example.* And, thankfully, Alice Oswald's renditions of her own work are another.**

Oswald is a poet I've admired for many years now. She writes largely about nature and humans' relationship to it, and is often associated with Ted Hughes. There certainly are clear links, but she doesn't emulate his quasi-shamanistic approach. She has said in past interviews that her writing tends to revolve around water and its movement, because it is one thing that constantly changes in all landscapes, even in ways that are not immediately noticeable, such as the rising and falling of groundwater levels. This interest is particularly obvious in Dart, her second collection, which focuses on the River Dart in Devon and its presence in the lives of people around it (and which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002).

Oswald's other most obvious defining feature is her use of imagery which is almost geometric or mathematical, focusing on shapes and colours and literal movements: "sections of distance tilted through the trees", or "the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines". She combines this with a rich texture of sounds and rhythm - for example, "Green shines rain / Like a looked at thing being turned in all directions". For me, in the second line of that quotation (from 'Ideogram for Green' in Woods etc.), the movement from the thick K/L sounds to the ING sounds and finally to the harder consonants of D/N/S towards the end suggests the "looked at thing" being turned, creating a kaleidoscopic mix of phonetics. And there are examples like this everywhere.

Her familiarity with the natural world is evident everywhere: she is a trained gardener; she produced a book of botanical poems with etchings by Jessica Greenman, Weeds and Wild Flowers; her play-poem Sleepwalk on the Severn captures the night-time wildlife and movement of the Severn estuary; and so on.

However, she is a classicist by degree, and has returned to this interest in her most recent collection Memorial, a re-imagining of the Iliad, which she describes in the introduction as a kind of "oral cemetery". She is aiming to imitate the ancient Greek tradition of lament, where a professional poet would work with women of the community to orally build a picture of the dead person. By paraphrasing from the Iliad mini-biographies of soldiers killed in the Trojan war, and mixing in directly translated Homeric similes, she creates a tapestry of mourning and death in amongst the constantly shifting, and mostly destructive, natural world.

But the poem is clearly meant for oral delivery, as the Iliad and poems like it would originally have been experienced by an ancient 'readership'. And, at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 14th August, an oral delivery is exactly what Alice Oswald gave us. She chose to recite the poem from memory, which she did fluently and powerfully (notwithstanding one slightly long pause when I assumed she had temporarily forgotten what came next). The recitation lasted for about 75 minutes, which, as she observed at the start, is a challenge for modern audiences. However, the crowd sat largely motionless throughout, a challenge in a stuffy festival tent - and made even more challenging by the gory nature of parts of the text:

... a spear / Thrown by Diomedes pushed hard in by Athene / Hit him between the eyes it split-second / Splintered his teeth cut through his tongue broke off his jaw / And came out clean through the chin

(For some reason Blogspot won't let me put a block quote on multiple lines without messing up the formatting. Apologies for this.)



That the poem is most suited for oral recitation is most obvious in the fact that each of Oswald's translated Homeric similes is printed twice in a row on the page, tempting a silent reader to skip the second iteration. The performance was enough to suggest why: an attentive listener, familiar with the words from the first time around, could use the second time to focus on the intonation and rhythm and penetration of the words. For me it helped with understanding the function of each simile on both levels: the literal image, sometimes with its own internal metaphors (a hawk chasing a dove "snares her with a thin cry / In praise of her softness"); and its relationship to the endless deaths of the men.

Of course, you could also see the first iteration as applying to the death described before it, and the second one as applying to the death described after it: the physical deaths often do not link so closely to the similes which follow them as to make them a clear 'unit' within the poem. The effect, therefore, is of a catalogue of specific deaths combined with a series of meditations on the nature of death itself -- it is like mules, exhausted by toil, or poppies being flattened by heavy rain, or a woman who stops spinning, or a fish jumping out of the water onto the sand, or fleeing fawns suddenly giving up and standing still. And this helps the poem to gain its "enargeia", its "bright unbearable reality", by the reduction of a narrative drive to something like Death is this, and also this, and also here, and also like this.

Oswald's reading certainly enhanced the enargeia she invokes. Her face, with its heavy fringe and angular jaw, is strong and makes you hope you never have to disagree with her. During the reading, she moved her head, and very little else. Her poetry-reading voice was low and only moderately expressive, as it was on the other two occasions I've seen her read. She slightly emphasised alliterations and rhythms. The impression was of an intense power and focus: she was telling us, not reading to us, but she was telling us as a poet, or a poet-prophet, rather than as a mourner or an actor. (Maybe there is something faintly shamanistic about this.)

The title Memorial suggests the timeless status that many classical texts enjoy, because the poem specifically sets out to remember the 'common men' who are sacrificed in epic conflicts -- including modern global conflicts, where casualties are barely a name who passes over the radio waves one day and into obscurity. There is of course an irony in the fact that these men get a short stanza each, if that, and no more -- nowhere near a whole book like Achilles or Odysseus -- but Oswald did not set out to construct them as individuals; rather she illuminates their value, briefly, before slaughtering them. The mixture of significance and insignificance perhaps encapsulates the essence of an army: no army exists without individuals, but both individuality and individuals are disposable in the name of a greater cause.

How different the problem of individuality in armed forces is from the problem of individuality in the civilian world, I don't know. Probably not very. And so Oswald's work does what all good poetry should do: it spins out and out and out and forces us to take cover from our own nature until the slaughter can be ended -- or, depending on how you look at it, completed.


* No, I'm not being paid by Faber and Faber.
** Really, I'm not. They just happen to publish really good poetry.