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Product Description
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE
The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald's first collection of poems, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice. Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the book introduced readers to her meditative, intensely musical style, and her breath-taking gift for visionary writing.
'The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr . . . a fresh and exciting first collection.' Kathleen Jamie, Times Literary Supplement
'an inspired debut of lightly-worn wisdom and verbal panache.' John Fuller
'Alice Oswald throws the windows of the imagination open; she places a fingertip on the pulse of tradition, and proves it is still very much alive.' The Times
About the Author
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart, her second volume, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc., won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006.
'Oswald emerges as an inheritor of some of Britain's greatest poetic voices, an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times
'Alice Oswald is making a new kind of poetry . . . she is in the front rank of writers, in poetry and prose, who are not content to work only with what exists already.' Jeanette Winterston
'The wonderful Alice Oswald who, by rights, should be winning every prize going this year.' Carol Ann Duffy
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Customer Reviews
One of my favourite poems from this collection is the first, 'Pruning in Frost' (Oswald is a gardener, and a better one that Marvell would have made). Although this poem is clearly breathed out in Oswald's own, unique and very modern voice, like so much startling atmosphere on a cold morning, I love it because it echoes sections of those gentle, Conversational Poems of my favourite poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The almost magical frost-imagery conjures his 'Frost at Midnight', and the single phrase (and I write from memory), 'I imagine Pain, turned heron,/ could fly off slowly in a creak of wings', conjures memories of the bird that Coleridge blesses in 'This Lime-tree Bower, My Prison'. A sensational piece of poetry, both in itself and as a subtle intertext.
Just as water is essential to life, it is essential to Oswald's poetry. Many of the poems in this collection have the sea at their heart. Oswald's 'Sea Sonnets' are models of the fluid, but recognisable use of a 'fixed form'. And her imagery and diction in these is again precisely chosen, but at the same time delightfully ambiguous. Take this little phrase, for example (and again I quote from memory), 'the wind japans the surface'. It seems so innocuous, but it invariably sets me off on a train of contemplation: does she mean that a rough wind on a loathsome day is 'japan-blackening' the surface, or is that word, 'japan', supposed to swash into our minds the image of an Hiroshige wave, all bright blues and spraying whites? Or...? The ambiguity creates a new poem each time we read it.
As with all debut collections, there are some everso-slightly weaker poems, or at least poems that I like less readily; still, even these poeticise the pants off much contemporary verse, even that by poets whom I genuinely admire! For example, this collection has a long final poem, 'The Wise Men of Gotham' (again from memory, I'm afraid!), which I can happily take or leave, despite its occasionally fine sections.
I can not recommend this wonderful collection strongly enough - look, a reviewer's cliché, where Oswald would use none! It has something of Coleridge in it; something of Robert Graves in the few 'relationship poems'; and something of that other, fine, contemporary poet, Elizabeth Garret - at her very best. Instinctively, my poetry of choice is usually that social-concern-done-eloquently verse of Carol Ann Duffy or Adrian Mitchell at his most pinko-red, but, but, but it is a joy to know that there are still apolitical, natural-world-and relationship-poets who can prune, water and train my urban soul. BUY IT! I certainly intend to pre-order her forthcoming book, 'Darts'.
The sea is well explored in a series of 4 sonnets, and a couple of poems that are based on old ballads. It is also the setting for the final 12 page narrative poem that tells the story of 3 wise men who set out to catch the moon in a net. I'm not drawn to long, narrative poetry, preferring prose for storytelling, but Oswald's subject is just quirky enough to keep it interesting.
Love lingers in many of the poems, quiet and at a distance. With Oswald it is her sense of understatement that packs a punch. "Wedding" is a beautiful and often quoted sonnet, ending with the lines: "and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,/which is like love, which is like everything." Though this poem is not stylistically typical of Oswald, being quite formal, it certainly has her feel for abstraction and image: "and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions..."
The very first poem is alive with metaphor, where after the title, the speaker "Pruning in Frost" becomes almost stone; it finishes:
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.
And I'd be staring, like one of those
cold-holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile is a likeable first collection, subtle and calming; as Kathleen Jamie wrote for the TLS, it's "like a zephyr", and it does leave the reader feeling refreshed. Oswald's poetry is not heavy or unnecessarily complex; instead, reading her work invigorates the soul, as gently as a soft breeze stirs treetops in passing.
Listmania!
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