Falling Awake

"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 "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 "A liminal text.... Unmistakably original." -- Times Literary Supplement "[A] modern classic." -- Sunday Times "[Falling Awake] does not disappoint.... Fierce in the quality of her attention, often metaphorically dazzling, Oswald earns our trust through her authority." -- Guardian "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 "Alice Oswald's poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world." -- Poetry Daily "[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention." -- Boston Review "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 "[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