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...
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 ...
"Ted Hughes was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world." --Seamus Heaney
Originally, the medieval bestiary, or book of animals, set out to establish safe distinctions--between them and us--but Ted Hughes's poetry works always in a contrary direction: showing what man and beast have in common, the reservoir from which we all draw. In A Ted Hughes Bestiary, Alice Oswald's selection is arranged chronologically, with an eye to different books and styles, but equally to those poems that embody...
"Ted Hughes was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world." ...
