Like Leaves: Alice Oswald’s Memorial
Memorial by Alice Oswald. Faber and Faber Ltd. 96 pp. £ 12.99 Hardback
This is an Iliad for our time, brilliantly updated by the sheer freshness of the writing, the simplification of situations to their timeless essentials, and constant subtle flashes of anachronism. But not “for our time” in any limiting sense. Oswald couldn’t be farther from the kind of cheap topicality that seems alive in the moment of writing and then dates as fast as newspapers go yellow. I think her poem will go on being contemporary and fresh for a long time to come.
Fundamentally she’s transformed epic into lyric, … Continue Reading