Falling Awake

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize: "Vivid…further proof of [Oswald's] bold engagement with poetry’s narrative possibilities." —Teju Cole

Alice Oswald’s award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial (“wryly ingenious,” said the New York Times Book Review) portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.

FROM “VERTIGO”
let me shuffle forward
and tell you the two minute life of rain
starting right now
lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze