Falling Awake

Description

A Short Story of Falling -- Swan -- Flies -- Fox -- Severed Head Floating Downriver -- Cold Streak -- Body -- A Rushed Account of the Dew -- Shadow -- Village -- Vertigo -- Looking Down -- Alongside Beans -- A Drink from Cranmere Pool -- Slowed-Down Blackbird -- Dunt -- Two Voices -- Sunday Ballad -- You Must Never Sleep under a Magnolia -- Aside -- Sz -- Evening Poem -- Tithonus -- And so he goes on.;Alice 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 forward and tell you the two minute life of rain starting right now lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze.