Falling Awake

Description

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award - Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize

"These lyrics...illustrate poetry's unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world." --Washington Post

Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, "give s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer's Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial--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

Awards

Shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize: Best Collection 2016.

Winner - 2016 Costa Poetry Award

Author description

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her collections include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award) and, most recently, Memorial, which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing. 'Dunt', included in this collection, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.