In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey–a poet abandoned on a stony island–and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god.
As with all of Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular, and liquid. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water–fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves.
Author: Alice Oswald
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 05/03/2022
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.21lbs
Size: 9.61h x 4.04w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9781324021780
Language: English
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