Like a stone
Stands by a grave and says nothing
Review of the W.W. Norton Company paperback edition (2013) of the original Faber & Faber hardcover (2011)

This is an extraordinarily beautiful meditation and elegy on death, loss and the fleeting nature of life. Although ostensibly a "version" of Homer's Iliad, it is Alice Oswald's poetic similes that follow each listing of a death or deaths from the Greek epic which are the affecting and haunting chorus to each passing.

Oswald starts off by listing all 200 names of the dead from The Iliad, from Protesilaus through to Hector. She then begins to intone each again, with some excerpts relating to their deaths in the epic and then following them with her similes, each of those latter repeated twice. In my ignorance I thought the repeats were a typo at first, and then realized the beauty of repeating them and letting their imagery sink in.

Like leaves
Sometimes they light their green flames
And are fed by the earth
And sometimes it snuffs them out

Like leaves
Sometimes they light their green flames
And are fed by the earth
And sometimes it snuffs them out

Like moonlight
Or the light of a bonfire
Burning on the cliffs
When sailors get blown along
Homesick over the sea
They notice that far-off fire
And think of their wives

Like moonlight
Or the light of a bonfire
Burning on the cliffs
When sailors get blown along
Homesick over the sea
They notice that far-off fire
And think of their wives

Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that ship of sparks
And then it's gone

Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that ship of sparks
And then it's gone

Reading this during the current pandemic and the extent of the worldwide loss of life due to that disease made me think of the mythological Trojan War as a metaphor for any sort of long term unjust forms of death and I became more focused on Oswald's choruses than the Iliad sections.

The poem is followed by an excellent Afterword by Eaven Boland in this 2013 Norton paperback edition.

I've been a long term fan of Christopher Logue's Homer in War Music (2015), but I have to confess that Alice Oswald has become my new fave Iliad adaptation.

My thanks to Liisa & family for this kind gift. ( )

I did not expect to be so moved.

Quite a horrific but beautiful account of war. ( )

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves ( )

I was enriched reading Alice Oswald’s free translations from ‘The Iliad,’ but less so by her and her afterworder Eavan Boland when they unimaginatively disparage both translation and written language itself.: “…she places herself in the active role of oral inheritor, rather than the more passive one of translator. ‘…I think [my] method…is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry…as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.’” (p. 85) ( )

LOVE the idea.... as always, hate the cheap melodramatic verse. very chilling to end it with the image of Hector on a "motorbike." also astoundingly clever how this was made book-length by straight up copy & pasting every simile stanza. ( )