Outcanoevre

Aingeal Clare

• Woods etc by Alice Oswald
  Faber, 56 pp, £12.99, May 2005, ISBN 0 571 21852 0

Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls. Oswald paints wild, stormy miniatures through which large figures lurch, blindfolded and burdened:

A mouldering man, a powdered and
reconstituted one,
walking the same so on and so on.
Rutty road. Winter etc.
Poached fields, all zugs and water.