Falling Awake

100 numbered copies, printed on wood-free paper, case-bound in foil-stamped Chinese coloured cloth, in a clear Perspex slipcase, signed by the author.

Alice Oswaldâe(tm)s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability âe" a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality âe" is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and lifeâe(tm)s 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 itâe(tm)s spoken as well as how itâe(tm)s 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 âe" goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time âe" 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.