[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"