Falling Awake
by Alice Oswald
Winner of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize: "Vivid...further proof of [Oswald's] bold engagement with poetry's narrative possibilities." —Teju ColeAlice Oswald's award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial ("wryly ingenious," said the New York Times Book Review) portrays fallen soldiers from Homer's Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.FROM "VERTIGO"let me shuffle forwardand tell you the two minute life of rainstarting right nowlips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze