Nobody

The new book from the greatest living British poet

Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in…this electrifying new work… It is out of this world – and in it. It is mythical and realistic, ancient and modern.

Sometimes the rush of unexpected language is thrilling… It is a wonderfully skilful tarantella of syllables and images… Nobody is Oswald’s most formally freehand work, a fragmentary gathering of murmurings searching for the excitement of new meaning.

[Oswald is] a revolutionary, an eco-poet whose ideas are alive with sensory experience. Her new book, Nobody, is a kind of verse novel which refuses even the conventions of storytelling.

[Nobody] is a paean to water, to the fluidity of language and the porousness between beings and stories… Both form and language echo the ceaseless drift, flitting movement and translucence of their uncontainable body…and, as with any memorable trip, the effects of reading Nobody linger in and around the mind long after the experience has passed.

The text (and characters) ebb and flow as mesmerically as the sea, a fluid abstraction that speaks to the power of the ocean.

Quiet, woozy, immersive…Nobody…[is] marvellous.

Seldom has the idea of being adrift been so feelingly realised.

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and has published several poetry collections, including Dart – a long poem about a river – and Memorial, a version of Homer's Iliad. She has been awarded the T.S Eliot Prize, Forward Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize and Costa Poetry Award. She was Oxford professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2024.

**WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019** 
 
'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer 
 
 This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. 
 
Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water - fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid. 
 
one person has the character of dust 
 
another has an arrow for a soul 
 
but their sto ries all end 
 
somewhere 
 
in the sea 
 
 'An invigorating book-length poem' Sara Wheeler

Falling Awake

The finest living British poet comes to Cape with her extraordinary new book 
 
Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize 
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize 
 
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

She says that poetry is what happens when language becomes impossible. If you’ve never read her – get this collection now.

A liminal text… Unmistakably original.

Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

A sublime poet of the natural world.

An astonishing book of beauty, intensity and poise – a revelation…The collection’s title is spot on. I cannot think of any poet who is more watchful or with a greater sense of gravity.

Stunning. Is she now our greatest living poet[?]… Her work is commanding… She is less twinkly-eyed than Simon Armitage, more committed to experimentation than Duffy and just as playful…as Don Paterson. For sheer, sustained invention and intellectual rigour, her work is perhaps closest to Kei Miller… 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.

The pieces included here are held together by Oswald’s luminous, almost alien powers of observation.

Magic, the music of nature, the resurrection of the dead: all these feel real when you read Alice Oswald. Her stunning new collection deserves the Forward Prize.

[It] confirms her as one of the most gifted English poets of the past 20 years.

She is a classicist and a gardener, an expert in the epic tradition and a riverside wanderer… Falling Awake provides the notation for an immersive aural experience; its current existence as a printed collection is not the incarnation for which it will be most celebrated, should Oswald choose to record it as a performance… It is certainly a strong contender in this year’s Forward Prizes, and a highly compelling meditation upon transience.

She not only makes some startlingly original imaginative leaps, but also manages to find the word to describe the scene when she lands.

It does not disappoint… Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority.

Falling Awake continues to mine a fresh, inventive seam of observational poetry, tuned in to revelation and a feeling for those moments when the world seems to become strangely, truly itself. Oswald’s best poems bear comparison with D. H. Lawrence’s late work.

A gorgeous collection incorporating mythology and the everyday in nature… [Oswald’s is] a rare and beautiful voice.

Here we find an intriguing poet with a distinctive voice and an eye for those fascinating collisions between the ordinary and the poetic… Falling Awake is distinguished particularly by the sheer brilliance of Oswald’s expression. Simple images are transformed by the perfect cadence, the perfect assonance to create an image… It is the mark of a truly skilled versifier that their greatest strength be the one that we might most expect in a poet, yet which is so rare – the ability to craft a verse that captures an image and elevates it by revealing its poetry.

Making it onto The Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist, it does not disappoint when it described the beauty of birds and insects. Keep it in your bag for bus journeys.

Falling Awake is easily one of the most accomplished collections of the past few years.

An absolute delight, with each carefully crafted line a revelation. Just try reading the lines out loud, and wait for the magic to catch you.

In her most recent collection, Falling Awake, we find Oswald maintaining her thoughtful and intimate connection with nature and mythology… Oswald is one of Britain’s greatest and most admired poets, and Falling Awake shows us why.

Oswald manages to make full formed, cool but passionate poems from the micro-moments that the rest of us either ignore or don’t know what to do with – the reflections of a cloud in a puddle, for example. With work free-formed, seductive and strange, Oswald is a terrific poet.

Oswald…is a marvellous poet whose work I treasure.

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize 
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize 
 
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 
 
Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. 
 
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. 
 
Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours – goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time – are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation

A Sleepwalk On The Severn

BBC Radio 4's extraordinary evocation of the experience of moonrise over the Severn Estuary, by award-winning poet Alice Oswald. Originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 10 March 2011.  Set to original music by Roger Goula, the subject of 'A Sleepwalk on the Severn' is moonrise, which happens five times in different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it.  Performed by Ron Cook, Sam Dale, Emma Fielding, Tom Goodman-Hill, James Laurenson and Helen Longworth. Music composed by Roger Goula and performed by the Raven Quartet and Rowland Sutherland.

Alice Oswald

Contained in Alice Oswald’s Rhapsody is everything I hold dear. This book is a living, guiding, singing thing, a poem essay which flows over the edges of our contemporary formal limitations to revitalise language, to re-stage a lost play... Because her listening is singularly deep and nature-trained, it is so diverse, nimble, attentive and assured. It is genuinely thrilling to be swept into this wild mastery, this beating thinking heart-work. I can’t remember being as excited or as wholly engaged by a book in years. The words vibrate through you as you read, thronged by the living and the dead, human and animal in splendour and agony. It is a revitalising and radical manifesto. I will cherish it and revisit it as long as I live.

Alice Oswald is one of England's most attuned, gifted and globally conscious poets — and to my mind, one of the finest living poets writing in English. Rhapsody... asks its reader to listen closely to the language of transcendence, written and spoken, without ever losing sight of the earth, the air, the water. It is finely balanced: at once celestial and deeply grounded.... Rhapsody expanded me, tuning me back into the essentials of my own poetic craft. At its heart, it is a rapturous meditation on where the power of the internal imagination meets the external natural world — and all of human worldliness in between

A Manifesto

'This book is a living, guiding, singing thing... I will cherish it and revisit it as long as I live' Max Porter 
 
'One of the finest living poets writing in English' Raymond Antrobus 
 
A daring, genre-defying work of non-fiction from one of our greatest poets 
 
Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form – before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice – and finds it still speaking all around us. 
 
What begins as an attempt to ‘interview’ Homer becomes a thrilling exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers and rivers. 
 
Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. 
 
At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognise poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.

Alice Oswald

Praise for Rhapsody

Contained in Alice Oswald’s Rhapsody is everything I hold dear. This book is a living, guiding, singing thing, a poem essay which flows over the edges of our contemporary formal limitations to revitali ...

Alice Oswald is one of England's most attuned, gifted and globally conscious poets — and to my mind, one of the finest living poets writing in English. Rhapsody... asks its reader to listen closely to ...

Books by Alice Oswald

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