Memorial
Alice Oswald
Memorial
Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.
4.6 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Poetry |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
96 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0571274161 |
| Publisher |
Faber and Faber |
| |
Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.
Read The Omnivore's roundup for WEEDS AND WILDFLOWERS and A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN.
Reviews
The Observer
Kate Kellaway
"All poetry has a memorial aspect – the fixing of a moment, a place, the passing of a life. But this is remembering on a grand scale. This is a concentrated, intense, multi-tasking elegy. And it is written with a freshness to match Homer's own – as if each soldier had died on the day of writing ... I long to hear Memorial performed; it would be tremendous."
02/10/2011
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The Guardian
Charlotte Higgins
"It is subtitled: "An Excavation of the Iliad", and described in her author's note as a "reckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem". Except it does not feel reckless at all, but precise and scalpel-sharp … A major achievement."
28/10/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Philip Womack
"Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead: “All vigorous men / All vanished”."
28/10/2011
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The Times
Peter Stothard
"Oswald laments her heroes whoever they are and whatever they have done."
17/09/2011
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The New Statesman
Tom Holland
"The measure of Oswald's poetry is that, in the dignity it affords the war dead, and in the shimmering potency of its imagery and its similes, her verse does approximate to the Homeric. And it is still hard, almost 3,000 years after Homer wrote his Iliad, to think of a higher term of praise."
17/10/2011
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