Falling Awake

Reviews

"[Oswald] writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, ‘Tithonus,’ may be the most beautiful work I read all year." — Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"After having exhausted language once, Oswald has returned to exhaust it again, her own voice speaking over the corpses of the world’s ever-present erosion…and challenging herself and her readers to conceptualize what new shape can come when the last reiterated ‘whip of sparks’ in the world and its many spheres has ‘gone,’ and then gone again." — Los Angeles Review of Books

"[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention." — Boston Review

"Alice Oswald’s poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world." — Poetry Daily

"Alice Oswald pulls off a feat in her seventh collection: she finds words for encounters with nature that ordinarily defy language.… [Falling Awake] is an astonishing book of beauty, intensity and poise—a revelation." — Observer

"[Falling Awake] does not disappoint.… Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority." — Guardian

"[A] modern classic." — Sunday Times

"A liminal text.… Unmistakably original." — Times Literary Supplement

"Stunning.… If there’s any justice in the poetry world, the title [Poet Laureate] should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again." — Daily Telegraph

"You won’t experience the full effect of Alice Oswald’s poetry unless you read her words aloud—she writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions." — Bustle