By: Alfred Goodwin
Author Bio:
Alfie is a first-year student passionate about English Literature and History and their intersections. Interested primarily in poetry; the metaphysicals, modernists, and contemporary poets are particular areas of fascination. In this review, Alfie attempts to convey why he believes the work of Alice Oswald, a significant contemporary poet, is worth a read.
THE REVIEW:
Alice Oswald, who was awarded the Oxford professorship of poetry in 2019, is widely celebrated as one of contemporary Britain’s foremost poets. Naturally, then, I sought to investigate for myself, and what I found in her 2005 collection ‘Woods etc.’, in my humble opinion, confirmed her lofty status.
‘Woods etc.’ demonstrates her immense technical skill and topical relevance as a writer, and explores themes both timely and timeless through striking imagery, metaphor, sound, and form. In this collection, Oswald seeks to illuminate the wonder and beauty of nature (though not without some angst) as well as the human place within it. Rejecting the ‘accustomed answers’ and habitual patterns of thinking and writing about the natural world, her poetry approaches nature from fresh perspectives, thus allowing one to reconnect with its wonderful strangeness, and even with its spiritual significance. Her dialogue with the High Modernist tradition—with influences like Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, and Ted Hughes discernible—makes her achievement even more compelling, as does her engagement with certain poets of the Romantic period. Ultimately, her verse adds to this heritage, and in this early fledgling of her poetic imagination we find a vital affirmation of both poetry and life.
Reminiscent of Ted Hughes, Oswald uses an abundance of metaphors, personifications, and periphrases to defamiliarise the natural world and bring into relief its wonderful strangeness. She takes the perspectives of flying seeds, stones, and seabirds, illuminating nature by exposing nooks of experience we perhaps would have never otherwise thought to explore. Even things as mundane as grass are enchanted by the poet, describing how ‘longer and longer and all day | on one foot is the practice of grasses.’ Such also demonstrates the humour that Oswald brings to this collection, another aspect of the joie de vivre that her treatment of nature consistently imparts.
That said, Oswald’s collection is not simply an unalloyed effusion and beauty and joy, but deals with darker themes: a characteristic which I felt deepened, rather than merely complicated, the resonance of her work, and redeemed it from naivety. More sombre themes emerge as she explores the human place within nature’s cycles, sometimes in an almost Eliotic vein. ‘What happens once will happen all over again’, a speaker utters. The self is but ‘provisional’, and human life is as fragile as a newborn baby, ‘purpose-built | to be melted away’, blemished by an ‘integral fault’. By often juxtaposing puny, fragile human structures with the all-encompassing gigantism of nature, Oswald creates the impression of an ephemeral, transient humanity dwarfed by the massive span of nature. Such meditations contribute to what I felt to be the spiritual yearning of the collection, a desire to ascend to ‘a new world known only to breathing’—to spirit, to the unsubstantial. Oswald sees the world as the ‘premise’ and the sky as the ‘conclusion’, but, refreshingly, this does not lead to a denial of the world, but instead to an affirmation of spiritual transcendence in addition to an affirmation of life.
Indeed, one of Oswald’s strengths is that she does not indulge in the sort of utopianism that construes wild nature as a paradise, and that, conversely, sees civilisation, or particular forms of civilisation, as Hell. Lyrics like her ‘Poem for Carrying a Baby out of Hospital’ express the suffering humans are conditioned to as embodied, vulnerable, and transient beings rather than our social circumstances.
Neither does she indulge in the self-flagellating antihumanism, instead writing poems which celebrate humankind’s achievements—a much neglected aspect of ‘nature’. The last poem, for example, is a ‘Sonnet’ written in honour of ‘Spacecraft Voyager 1’ It seems to me, then, that Oswald’s treatment of ‘nature’ does not entail the repudiation of civilisation or humanism, as it does in certain other contemporary philosophies; which represents a refreshing change of approach.
In summary, then, Oswald’s ‘Woods etc.’ is an enchanting treatment of a relevant subject, and its formal mastery and dialogue with the tradition makes it very interesting. Many readers, therefore, from aspiring poets, to those simply enamoured with nature, to anybody, ultimately, who delights in the triumph of a vital and fruitful human imagination, will inevitably find this collection to be a very rewarding piece of reading.
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