I noted in my last post on the topic that this list would contain things I discovered in 2010, rather than things released during the year.  I’m sure many of you will understand what I mean by a to-read pile that grows faster than you can make it shrink.  It’s hard to keep up with brand new books when so many older ones remain untapped on the shelf.  2010 was a good year for Alice Oswald, winning as she did the inaugural Ted Hughes award for Weeds and Wild Flowers, but the book I want to enthuse about here is her previous one, published a few years back and titled Woods etc. 

When I read this I wish I was in the middle of nowhere, preferably surrounded by trees.  Since usually I am not, this book is a good second best.  It captures the quiet thoughtfulness that can overtake you when you are alone in the woods, or on top of a cliff, or half way up a moor in the wind, or in any place raw and natural.  Oswald is very much a nature poet, very fittingly in the mode of Hughes.  In her hands nature is depicted neither as a Bambi-esque paradise or an indifferent monster.  It’s just what nature is: weird and magical and beautiful and sometimes menacing.  I love it that Oswald can distil a sense of that into a handful of words.  You can read them on the bus and still feel their inspiration. 

In Tree Ghosts, one of the poems in this collection, Oswald uses this made up word: Earsight.  And that is exactly what her poems grant to the reader.  If you read this collection your earsight will (if you’ll allow me the liberty of making up a word of my own) hearsee woods, trees and stars as well as such far-flung locations as the planet Mercury and the depths of outer space.  Not only that, but everything your earsight will report will seem vividly real.

It’s hard to find links to online copies of her poems.  I think the relationship between publishers of poetry and the internet is still a little coy.  Here, however, is a good one.  It’s an interview with Oswald that ends with the poem Woods Not Yet Out.  Enjoy…