Memorial: A Version of Homer's - Hardcover

Oswald, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393088677 ISBN 13: 9780393088670

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Synopsis

“The most remarkable and affecting book of poetry I encountered this year.”―James Wood, The New Yorker

In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad―the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen―in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer’s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer’s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life.

About this title

About the Author:

Alice Oswald is the author of eight books of poetry, including Memorial and Falling Awake, winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize. Elected as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry in 2019, Oswald lives in Bristol, England, with her family.

Eavan Boland is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction. A professor and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, she is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Award. She lives in Stanford, California, and Dublin, Ireland.

Review:

“Remembering on a grand scale . . . with a freshness to match Homer’s own―as if each soldier had died on the day of writing.”
- Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0393088677
• ISBN 13: 9780393088670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 112