Alice Oswald

I'm not sure how I discovered that Alice Oswald would be doing a poetry reading at the Peninsular Arts in Plymouth last week, but once I knew I was onto two tickets in a flash.

Peninsular Arts is part of Plymouth University which is slowly building up its Arts study programme after years of being a predominantly science-based institution, and before that, in the days when I did my health visitor training there, a Polytechnic. The place has come a long way since then, with massive new building projects, a medical school with an outstanding vision for training doctors slightly differently, and for the arts the Roland Levinsky building. Interestingly I knew of Roland Levinsky in my Great Ormond Street days, originally a professor of immunology before eventually moving to Plymouth to be Vice Chancellor of the university, and to steer through this blending of arts and science in a faculty more famed for its oceanography than its poetry readings. Sadly Roland Levinsky was killed in a tragic accident on New Year's Day some years ago, walking into some fallen electricity cables, and so he didn't live to see the vision now taking shape.

So anyway I booked two tickets, taking full advantage of the senior concessions, especially given that I turned up for something about eight years ago, handed over the full cost for my ticket and was given £2 back 'because I was over sixty,'... when I was actually fifty two.

The less said about how good that made me feel the better.

Bookhound is not famed for his love of poetry and may never have been to a poetry reading before, but he gamely said he'd come along and, given that is was a 7pm start, we had agreed that we would sit in the back row and I would nudge him if he looked like he was dropping off, or worse started snoring.

The lights dimmed in the lecture theatre and Alice Oswald, once introduced, leant forward on the lectern and proceeded to read some short poems...except she didn't have a book..or any words to hand.

We both as of one looked around to see if something was being projected onto the wall behind us..

Surely she wasn't reciting by heart??

Well she was...and she did for the next forty-five minutes.

Short poems and longer extracts from Dart and Memorial and we were completely spell-bound... absolutely no chance of Bookhound falling asleep, he was transfixed.

Now I have heard poetry 'readings' before but I don't think ever in performance like this, and so it had never occurred to me that there might be a difference, and that it would make the poetry come alive in the way that it did. Alice Oswald's diction is clear and precise, and the pitch and modulation of her voice was of course perfectly attuned to her own writing.

Not all poets manage this... I'm not quite sure how to describe the rather ethereal delivery that I have heard from other poets in the past, where the voice wavers tremulously beyond the normal register, as if to invest some magic but only succeeding in making me want to giggle. Alice Oswald was having none of that; the voice was sure and steady, echoing and gently resonating out of the dim light that didn't illuminate but rather kept her in shadow, and the timing was immaculate, making the gaps and the silences an important part of the whole. Memorial, described as an excavation of Homer's Iliad, and an invocation to the dead of the Trojan wars..

'an attempt to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing; a series of memories and similes laid side by side; an antiphonal account of man in his world.'

And as Alice moved through the succession of final similes in Memorial, leaving an imperceptibly longer gap between each one, we were on the edge of our seats waiting ...  

'Like tribes of summer bees
Coming up from he underworld out of a crack in a rock
A billion factory women flying to their flower work
Being born and reborn shimmering over the fields.'

And I cast another quick glance behind me...surely there had to be a screen projecting the words for her, this was truly remarkable.

Asked afterwards how she committed the poetry to memory Alice Oswald said the short poems had involved so much careful work, word by word work, that they were readily embedded. Memorial was memorised on a daily circuitous estuary walk ( Alice lives in nearby Totnes) and it was that walk that she had envisaged in her mind as she spoke. It was a lovely thought that explained the pacing and the flow which created the powerful atmosphere of the delivery right down to the final words.

Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And then its gone

Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And then its gone

I'm not a classicist, and if I am honest I am not that familar with Homer's Iliad, so I hadn't really grasped Memorial. I somehow couldn't connect with it in the same enthused way that I have with Dart and the other collections, even though I have the CD of Alice Oswald reading it... I hadn't listened to it properly. To my unexpected delight listening to it in performance has opened the whole book up to me and I shall embark on it properly now. 

Like the geek that I am I had taken all my books along and Alice very kindly signed them before Bookhound and I headed off to drive home across Dartmoor marvelling at what we has just experienced.

If Alice Oswald is 'performing' her poetry anywhere near you then don't miss it.