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In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey--a poet abandoned on a stony island--and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god.
As with all of Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular, and liquid. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; 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.
Kamran Javadizadeh is a writer and professor.
“There is one kind of water when it hangs over him / a man is a nobody underneath a big wave / his loneliness expands his hair floats out like seaweed” Alice Oswald, from Nobody https://t.co/2dyzgXHWTm
pansexual polyam feminist cis white settler, anti-racist bully, writer, editor, publisher. author of Beast Body Epic available on https://t.co/2TVogG601l.
thanks to @snullr for the recommendation @DavidNaimon i esp loved the engagement w/ colour, but this episode is fascinating throughout. #BetweentheCovers Alice Oswald : Nobody https://t.co/zDiqeDEBJP via @Tin_House