Memorial by Alice Oswald

Memorial by Alice Oswald

Matthew Arnold praised the "Iliad" for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. ""The Iliad" is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world...compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking". (Alice Oswald).

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart, her second collection, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006, and in 2009 she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Sleepwalk On The Severn, a poem for several voices set at night on the Severn Estuary.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780571274161
ISBN 10	0571274161
Title	Memorial
Author	Alice Oswald
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Faber & Faber
Year published	2011-10-06
Number of pages	160
Prizes	Winner of Warwick Prize for Writing 2013
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable