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Falling Awake
Alice Oswald
€ 15.99
€ 12.34
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Description for Falling Awake
Paperback. Written to be read aloud, this book features poems that 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. Num Pages: 96 pages. BIC Classification: DCF. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 132 x 198 x 11. Weight in Grams: 116.
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.
Product Details
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Condition
New
Weight
115g
Number of Pages
96
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781910702437
SKU
V9781910702437
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-11
About Alice Oswald
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), Memorial (Warwick Prize for Writing), and Falling Awake, which won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry.
Reviews for Falling Awake
She says that poetry is what happens when language becomes impossible. If you've never read her - get this collection now.
Jeanette Winterson
Guardian, Book of the Year
[A] modern classic.
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Sunday Times, Book of the Year
A miraculous collection.
Kate Kellaway
Observer, Book of the Year
A liminal text... Unmistakably original.
Craig Raine
Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year
A sublime poet of the natural world.
Rupert Thomson
Herald, Book of the Year
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.
Kate Kellaway
Observer
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.
Charlotte Runcie
Daily Telegraph
The pieces included here are held together by Oswald's luminous, almost alien powers of observation.
Yasmine Seale
Literary Review
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.
Sunday Telegraph
[It] confirms her as one of the most gifted English poets of the past 20 years.
Jeremy Noel-Todd
Sunday Times
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.
Phil Brown
Huffington Post
She not only makes some startlingly original imaginative leaps, but also manages to find the word to describe the scene when she lands.
Roger Cox
Scotland on Sunday
It does not disappoint... Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority.
Fiona Sampson
Guardian
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.
John McAuliffe
Irish Times
[It is] Terrific.
Mark Ford
Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year
Jeanette Winterson
Guardian, Book of the Year
[A] modern classic.
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Sunday Times, Book of the Year
A miraculous collection.
Kate Kellaway
Observer, Book of the Year
A liminal text... Unmistakably original.
Craig Raine
Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year
A sublime poet of the natural world.
Rupert Thomson
Herald, Book of the Year
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.
Kate Kellaway
Observer
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.
Charlotte Runcie
Daily Telegraph
The pieces included here are held together by Oswald's luminous, almost alien powers of observation.
Yasmine Seale
Literary Review
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.
Sunday Telegraph
[It] confirms her as one of the most gifted English poets of the past 20 years.
Jeremy Noel-Todd
Sunday Times
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.
Phil Brown
Huffington Post
She not only makes some startlingly original imaginative leaps, but also manages to find the word to describe the scene when she lands.
Roger Cox
Scotland on Sunday
It does not disappoint... Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority.
Fiona Sampson
Guardian
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.
John McAuliffe
Irish Times
[It is] Terrific.
Mark Ford
Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year