After watching & re-watching & thinking obsessively about Alice Oswald’s Oxford Professor of Poetry public lecture at the end of June, I rationed myself by slowly reading her most recent book. Nobody is a book-length “collage of stories” in dialogue with and from Homer’s Odyssey.
Oswald’s a genius of precision and vision, possibly the greatest poet working in English today. She’s a trained classicist, who in her book Memorial compressed the Iliad into just death-scenes. She’s also a superlative water-poet. Her Oxford lecture brought together three images of tears: a poem by Jericho Brown about Emmet Till’s mother, the moment in the Odyssey when the hero breaks down while being feasted by the Phaeacians, and John Donne’s “Valediction: Of Weeping.” Her stunning book-length poem Dart (2002) traces the West Country river through time and space.
Nobody is her ocean book, which makes it especially fascinating for an Ocean-thinker like me. I’m not sure after just one reading that I can respond cogently to the scope and dizzying range of the poem, which juxtaposes Odysseus with a nameless poet marooned on a solitary island after the Trojan war. (See Od 3.267). So instead I’ll cite some of the most gorgeous sea-phrases, in which the poet gets us a little closer to the oceanic heart of things —
what does it matter what he sings
there is all this water between us
and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye (3)
made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything
because it is deep it is a dead field fenceless
a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling
which in its patience always wears away the hard things (5)
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings (13)
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains
unbroken (15)
This is one kind of water when it hangs over him
a man is a nobody underneath a big wave (23)
…the pleasure-crinkled sea (31)
and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water
a morsel of ice a glamour of oil
and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal
and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings (32)
but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst
goes on creeping over stones and shrinking away (39)
tell me muse of this floating nobody (50)
it is human to have a name but you seem unsolid somehow
almost too porous to be human I would say
some repetition has eaten into you
as water eats into metal this is what happens
whenever love is mentioned your whole heart liquifies
and the character of water stares out through your eyes (63)
there seem to be two worlds one is water’s
which always finds its level one is love’s which doesn’t (69)
