Alice Oswald : Woods, etc.
(Faber, London, 2005; hardcover, 64pp, £12.99; isbn 0571218520, Paperback edition due in May 2006 at £8.99)

The blurbs on Alice Oswald's Woods etc. contradict one another. "Alice Oswald is making a new kind of poety . . . she is in the front rank of writers . . . who are not content to work only with what exists already." (Jeanette Winterson). "Oswald emerges as an inheritor of some of Britain's greatest poetic voices, an heir to [Hughes Heaney and Hill] " (Rachel Campbell-Johnson). I find Winterson more accurate, and in a straight manner of speaking which suits the poetry, rather than the patriarchist puff of inheritance and great names.

            I say this in spite of the fact that Oswald to some extent presents herself as a follower of Hughes. She gave the 2005 Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture (excerpted in The Guardian 3rd December 2005) in praise of him. What she seems to value in his poetry is a replication of experience through dramatised language, getting what it's like to be Hughes where he is (in a field usually) and above all with immediacy. She speaks of "verbal presence", "magic". . . by which the reader is admitted to "the raw animal truth underneath" and calls his technique "counterpoint" by which I take it she refers to his manipulation of metaphor as a means of heightening the excitment around a singular experience (of a certain kind) by drawing elsewheres into it as momentary verbal intensifiers. She is particularly pleased that the regenerated experience is not "remembered", not distanced (and presumably not displaced by any abstract or philosophical considerations) but, as it were, smashed right in your face. You are, in fact, there where it's happening. An ecological argument is introduced to claim a value for this merging of reader and poet in a rustic or "natural" place (and only Hughes' rustic pieces are discussed in the extracts available). We can't all get out onto the land and get our hands mucky but we live it authentically through the poems.

            Probably very many people these days see poetry this way, as a replication of authorial experience, and are for the most part content to be fed a much lesser scenario of human event than Hughes offers, frequently commonplace and uneventful, uninfected by wisdom or even thought, politically inert, but "magically" reconstituted on the page: verbal tricks (or counterpoint) projecting a theatre of "I" that everyone can share as an end in itself.

            Metaphoricity is the principal vehicle: whether intensely emotive/sensual (Hughes) or trivial/ticklish (‘Martian'), and indeed the movement represented by the Three Big Hs has to be recognised as a welcome renewal of poetical figuration through metaphor after the poverty inflicted on the medium by Larkin and The Movement.

            But surely what was so refreshing about Oswald's long poem Dart (Faber 2002) was precisely a freedom from metaphorical pressure in favour of facticity, plain-spokenness, a prosaic relief from all the sticky metaphors and poetry tricks of the Senatorial Hs. The opening lines—

            Who's this moving alive over the moor?

            An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

            Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
            does he fully intend going in over his knees off the
             military track from Okehampton? . . .

are not Hughesian, but rather Wordsworthian. The first thing Oswald says about Hughes, remembering her first experience of one of his poems is, "I was instantly drawn in." All the Big Hs do this — they draw you in: to an experience, a rusticity, to a theology and a history, to an Irishness, which they insist is important, and they draw you in with force and offer you no alternatives, and they do this by metaphor-laden forms of rhetoric. The opening lines of Dart don't grab hold of you and drag you in: they offer you an entrance. If it is insisted that we are still "drawn in" it is at our own wish: we have agreed to the contract proposed. The whole of Dart maintains that tone, as a text without designs on the reader, without self-projection, which achieves its form by following a simple terrestrial course and harmonising the voices of others.

The short poems of Woods etc. have an almost anonymous intensity, most of it sustained over image fields of elemental nature. They seem to be arranged in a cosmogonic pattern from sea and water through land and growth, to creatures, and the last few poems of sky and space, though there are misfits and interleaved small narratives of human or mythical situation. But the main point is the way language is worked in these pieces around earthly existence, always poised, and comprehensive, and extraordinarily precise, and free of intervention. We could indeed be talking about a kind of self-sacrifice into the text, for the more impersonal the poems are the more they are infused with sense material which can only come from practised observation and strong response, and those can only come from the author. Yet the author is never more than marginally present. So: song-forms, meditations on elemental terrestrial forms, spells, voices, old stories re-spoken, invocations (rather than descriptions), animations, etc. And modern poems of a tense objectivity:

            Easternight, the mind's midwinter

            I stood in the big field behind the house
            at the centre of all visible darkness

            a brick of earth, a block of sky,
            there lay the world, wedged
            between its premise and its conclusion            (Field, p.25)

The sense of address here, the tension between "the mind" and "I", the delicate sparseness of figuration and the faultless elision into the abstract, these all bespeak a serious engagement with the real which has no need of illustrative exempla, no newspapers or new gadgets. The world's thusness fills the linguistic space. But if thus far the cast of the poem seems close to obvious, consider the way in the middle of the same poem the language embraces contradictory (and by writing-school standards ungainly) repetition—

            almost midnight — I could feel the earth's
            soaking darkness squeeze and fill its darkness,
            everything spinning into the spasm of midnight

surely a very precise realisation of an experience of unity. Or the way the ending of the poem happily breaks up the quite unnerving isolation into a multi-faceted scatter of single words, a kind of release into a grammarless space of life-fragments—

            and for a moment, this high field unhorizoned
            hung upon nothing, barking for its owner

            burial, widowed, moonless, seeping

            docks, grasses, small windflowers, weepholes, wires

This is not an easy poetry. We don't even know what all those things are, and certainly not what story their order unfolds. Interpreters can go to work, but this conclusion will always be mysterious, which is not to say meaningless or haphazard. There is a sense of loss as the compact world floats away in bits on a water of initial Ws — or is it a sense of gain, as of first light breaking the dark block and revealing the vocabulary of the real, a return home? Oswald's language is always ready to abandon rationality and syntax, and to appear as a thing in the process of formation, and there is never an appeal to ease of reading except in the lighter pieces. There are some modernistic(?) formulations which I find defeating, particularly singular/plural clashes, as in the complete unit, "evening river that scarcely are".

"Pastoral", is it? I don't know. Not much about Capitalism in it certainly, or wars in the middle east. There is no "line" of modern poetry to which it is affiliated. Thompsonesque at times, and a name like De la Mare might suddenly occur to you . . . though you might also occasionally suspect a post-Poundian attention to Chinese verse. Nor is it entirely free from Martianisms (self-regarding figurative ingenuity). Nature is certainly the main focus (as against Hughes' "countryside", a quite different proposition) which becomes simply the earth, where we happen to live. Perhaps there is a poetical wisdom which rightly refuses the widest political and even social agendas in favour of a contribution to an authentic realisation of individual experience, and far from turning its back, actually turns to face the human fact itself, including the delight it takes in its very existence. Perhaps the sensing and shaping of human experience of the bionosphere cannot be a "distraction" from anything. Perhaps there are rights implied which people are fighting for.

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