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From The Times
January 5, 2008

Alice Oswald

The 50 greatest postwar writers: 47

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Some modern poets might get away with a remote contemplation of the world and draw lessons or images (improving or otherwise) from their meditations, but Alice Oswald, born in 1966, has lived in Devon long enough to know at first hand, with her hands, the material, shape-shifting nature-in-motion of our environment. Her work is sensual, intuitive in its awareness of lively and inert matter, aware of the limits of human control and visionary in its metaphorical significance. Her work — The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1994), the breakthrough Dart and Woods etc (2005) — is influenced by Ted Hughes in its mythic, mystic elements, but her tactile identification of (and with) the material world is her own, giving narrative voice to natural elements (water, stone). Her versatile use of verse (free, rhymed and unrhymed), verse forms (ballads, sonnets) and prose is liberating and striking.

One to read: Dart (2002)

More about Alice Oswald

Read Tower Poetry’s review of Alice Oswald’s third collection of poetry, Woods etc

See the full top 50 list here

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