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English
Jonathan Cape Ltd
05 September 2019
The new book from the greatest living British poet
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*WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019
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'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer

This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.

Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean- a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water - fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element- dense, muscular and liquid.

one person has the character of dust

another has an arrow for a soul

but their sto ries all end

somewhere

in the sea

'An invigorating book-length poem' Sara Wheeler

By:  
Imprint:   Jonathan Cape Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 196mm,  Width: 130mm,  Spine: 14mm
Weight:   120g
ISBN:   9781787331969
ISBN 10:   1787331962
Pages:   88
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her collections include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award), Memorial (Warwick Prize for Writing), and Falling Awake, which won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was elected as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry in 2019.

Reviews for Nobody

Nobody...is a paean to water, to the fluidity of language and the porousness between beings and stories... Both form and language echo the ceaseless drift, flitting movement and translucence of their uncontainable body...and, as with any memorable trip, the effects of reading Nobody linger in and around the mind long after the experience has passed. * Financial Times * The text (and characters) ebb and flow as mesmerically as the sea, a fluid abstraction that speaks to the power of the ocean. * i *


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