Alice Oswald – Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field

The 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize

For various reasons, 2016 was not much of a year for reading, or reviewing poetry. So, the experience of reviewing the collections shortlisted for the 2016 T.S. Eliot prize was an intense one: a book a week from October to December. Rachael Boast’s Void Studies was the first up and this was a poetry collectionContinue reading “The 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize”

Alice Oswald’s Memorial

Buy Memorial from Faber and Faber Names assume epic proportions when listed. The Roman Catholic church’s First Eucharistic Prayer seduces with its exotic incantations, the priest intoning the names of the saints through a haze of incense: Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus. In the opening pages of Memorial, Oswald presents her reader withContinue reading “Alice Oswald’s Memorial”