Alice Oswald

La hoja que sigue haciéndose en su pérula, el susurro de las cosas oculto en el interior, el latido de las ramas muertas. El lento flujo que alimenta una forma enroscada bajo tierra, hora tras hora la vegetacion que renueva formas estrelladas de celulas y poros y retoños acuaticos, que se acumula, que deriva en una presion, un paulatino modelar de un anhelo de luz, una manita abriendose, tanteando en esa mano todo el sentido del propio ser puesto friamente, el yo provisional, inexplicable en el aire, bailando al contacto con el viento“. Hoja”, de Alice Oswald. Alice Oswald (Inglaterra, 1966), que fue jardinera en el Tapley Park de Devony en el Chelsea Physic Garden de Londres, esta considerada como una de las poetas mas poderosas y singulares de su generacion. En su obra brillan los poemarios Dart (2002, Premio T. S. Eliot), Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009, Premio Ted Hughes), Memorial (2011) y este Woods etc. (2005) que celebramos presentar aqui con el titulo de Bosques, etc., en lo que constituye la primera traduccion de un libro suyo al español.

'Mesmeric' - "Sunday Times". 'Oswald has soul in riverfuls' - "Guardian". Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in "Dart" a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. Alice Oswald read classics at Oxford, trained as a gardener and now lives in Devon with her husband and their two sons. "Dart" is her second collection. Her first, "The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile", won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her most recent collection is Woods etcetera.

Using conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon as a poetic census, Alice Oswald creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are varied and idiomatic - poacher, ferryman, sewage worker, mill worker, forester and swimmers.

This is a book-length poem a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as 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. As with all of Alice Oswalds work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.

Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices, drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize. A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Alice Oswalds poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability - a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality - is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and lifes losing struggle with the gravity of nature. 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 its spoken as well as how its thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. 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 - goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time - 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.

Aquesta és una traducció de l'atmosfera de la_ Ilíada_. Oswald s'immergeix en el text homèric per despullar-lo de la narrativa -la ira d'Aquil·les, la història d'Helena- i sortir-ne amb un poema que