Oswald, Alice 1966-

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OSWALD, Alice 1966-

PERSONAL: Born 1966; married Peter Oswald (a playwright); children: two. Education: Oxford University, B.A.; attended Wisley University.

ADDRESSES: Home—Devon, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Faber & Faber Ltd., 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU, England.

CAREER: Worked as a gardener in Tapley Park, Devon, and the Chelsea Physic Garden; writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Gregory Award, 1994; Forward Prize and Poetry Book Society Choice citation, for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile; T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, 2003, for Dart.

WRITINGS:

The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (poetry), Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1996.

Dart (poetry), Faber (London, England), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Alice Oswald's poetry has roused considerable enthusiasm in her native Great Britain. A former gardener, Oswald roots her work in the natural world, and her poems "have a quirky individuality that beguiles even as it risks mannerism," to quote Michael O'Neill in Contemporary Women Poets. Oswald's second volume, Dart, won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize in 2003, and her debut collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was a Poetry Book Society choice—an honor rarely extended to a first book. In Guardian Unlimited, David Wheatley wrote: "Oswald joins Ciaran Carson, Iain Sinclair, Ted Hughes and ultimately [James] Joyce himself as one of the great celebrants of the genius loci, the spirit of place, or what the Irish call dinnseanchas, lovingly elaborated topographical lore."

The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile draws its visions from Oswald's work in the soil. Some reviewers noted that the poems have the qualities of nursery rhymes or fairy tales upgraded for an adult sensibility. "The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr. This is a fresh and exciting first collection," maintained Kathleen Jamie in the Times Literary Supplement. Avatar Review correspondent Steve Harris concluded of the book: "The reader will find in the mysterious and beautiful poetry of Alice Oswald a number of enchanting seas on which to sail, magical seashores to walk, and secret gardens to explore."

Oswald worked on her poem Dart for more than three years. The lengthy poem follows the Dart River from its naissance in Cranmere Pool to the point where it flows into the sea. Along the way many narrative voices blend with the essence of the river itself: foresters and laborers, sewage plant workers, swimmers and canoeists, all contribute to the flow of river and poem. On the Poetry Society Web site, Oswald commented: "My idea was to orchestrate [the poem] like a kind of jazz, with various river-workers and river-dwellers composing their own parts. The result was to be a river's story, from source to mouth, written by the whole Dart community." The author explored the river in great detail, interviewing those people she found along its shores. She then transcribed their comments from memory, and only then listened to her audio recordings. The varied human voices are joined by the animals, plants, and insects that abide in or near the river.

"Dart is an attempt to give an outline to that disappearing shape, exploring the balance between the river as wild force of nature and biddable resource," observed Wheatley. "This is a heartening book for all sorts of reasons. Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. Dart frequently combines the two, moving in the same sentence from religious invocation to marketing jabber. . . . She sows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the available range of tonal and thematic possibilities. She offers, in a word, what too much contemporary poetry forbids itself: ambition." Times Literary Supplement reviewer Richard O'Brien noted that Dart "is about everything the river touches." The critic added: "Oswald knows the details of the river well and her task in this poem is partly to acquaint us with them. Beyond this, though, a deeper understanding of the river's meaning is the end towards which Dart really moves." O'Brien found some passages of the poem "immediately haunting." In his review of the work for the Poetry Society Web site, Deryn Rees-Jones concluded: "Through the muttering river Oswald implicitly also asks us to rethink important questions about the relationship of the feminine to both language and nature in the twenty-first century. Dart is many things: ambitious, lyrical, clever, suggestive, complex, sometimes exquisitely beautiful. It is hard to think of many contemporary poems which have such range, and carry such authority and vision."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Women Poets, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Times Literary Supplement, August 16, 1996, Kathleen Jamie, "Dark but Brimming," p. 25; October 18, 2002, Richard O'Brien, "Many-Headed Turbulence," p. 26.