Falling Awake: Poems - Alice Oswald

\nFalling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, give s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer's Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial--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. \nFROM VERTIGO \n let me shuffle forward \nand tell you the two minute life of rain \nstarting right now \nlips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze\n