Falling Awake

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize, winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award, shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award, and shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize. A Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Herald, New Statesman, Sunday Times, and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Alice Oswald's poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply engaged in the natural world. Mutability—a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality—is at the heart of this new collection, and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life and life's losing struggle with the gravity of nature. Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes, sounds, and momentum of the language as it's spoken, as well as how it's thought: fresh, fluid, and propulsive, but also fragmentary and repetitive. These are poems that are written.