Falling Awake

<p><b>Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize<br>Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award<br>Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award<br>Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize</b><br><br><b>A <i>Daily Telegraph </i>/ <i>Guardian </i>/ <i>Herald </i>/ <i>New Statesman </i>/ <i>Sunday Times </i>/ <i>Times Literary Supplement </i>Book of the Year</b><br><br>Alice Oswald&#146;s poems are always vivid and distinct alert and deeply <i>physically</i> engaged in the natural world. Mutability &#150; a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality &#150; is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life and life&#146;s losing struggle with the gravity of nature.<br><br>Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it&#146;s spoken as well as how it&#146;s thought: fresh fluid and propulsive but also fragmentary repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud.<br><br>Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book alive in an English landscape stuck in the clockwork of their own speech and the Hours &#150; goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time &#150; are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling and the lines are in constant motion: approaching from daring new angles our experience of being human and coalescing into poems of simple stunning beauty.</p>