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The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
Alice Oswald's first book of poems, The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile is more confident and achieved than many first collections. Previously published in Anvil New Poets 2 , a selection chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and winner of the 1994 Eric Gregory Award, Oswald already clearly demonstrates a
distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the
intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham , a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally
talented young poet.
distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the
intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham , a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally
talented young poet.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
6 people are currently reading
197 people want to read
About the author
Alice Oswald
35 books234 followersAlice Oswald (born 1966) is a British poet who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
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August 17, 2014
Alice Oswald is both a nature poet and a religious poet. For her, there is no real separation between the two -- she finds a complex harmony all around her; this, in turn, feeds her observations of the world. She doesn't seek to scientifically categorize this harmony but takes it on trust. Her poetic approach towards nature recalls Hopkin's belief that “nature is never spent” and that “[t:]here lives the dearest freshness deep down things .” Like Hopkins, she senses the Holy Spirit's (or whatever the equivalent is in her cosmology) “warm breast.” She too writes of the unnamed, its “bright wings.” She is reconciled with nature where Wordsworth was not. Oswald, once a professional gardener, is particularly attuned to nature's shifts - however harsh. In the collection's opening poem, “Pruning in Frost,” she suffers the gardener's winter:
Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.
Work knocks in me the winter's nail.
Oswald is able to transform her little sufferings into a kind of religious experience that is both contemplative and real, but also humorous, as she mocks herself before the Mediaeval kings with her Mediaeval “Pain” - with its allegorically capitalized “P”:
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly slowly in a creak of wings.
And I'd be staring, like one of those
cold holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
("Pruning in Frost")
Oswald's church is all around her. She finds her greenhouse is both a “hole” and the “sun's chapel,”even though it is raining outside. She marvels at what grows there:
Cucumbers, full of themselves,
the long green lungs of that still air,
image the fruits of staying put,
like water beetles in woodland puddles
and hoofprints.
Oswald also views herself as a hole. This is not a negative condition of being, but a willing abandonment of self, so that like her glass house chapel, she becomes filled with impressions of the physical world. She finds her delights in simple things. It is a kind of love that circles into her inner being while at the same time emanating outward, achieving a balance, much like prayer:
And I
am a hole in the glass house,
taking my time between the rows.
The leaves, the yellow blooms, the pots,
vanish through a loop of thoughts.
Some of the most beautiful poems of this collection can be found in Oswald's sonnets. Time and again she utilizes the repetition of words, such as “sea” and “moon” and “water” to great musical effect, particularly in a series of sea sonnets:
The sea crosses the sea, the sea has hooves;
the powers of rivers and the river's weir's curves
are moving in the wind-bent acts of waves.
And then the softer waters of the wells
and soakaways - hypostasis of holes,
which swallow up and sink for seven miles;
and then the boat arriving on the island
and nothing but the sea-like sea beyond.
("Sea Sonnet")
Oswald turns often to the sea in her poetry. In another sea sonnet, she startles the reader, pleasantly, with both imagery and inventive language. It is like sailing in a musical rainbow:
Grey, green and yellow, the sea and the weather
instantiate each other and the spectrum
turns in it like a perishable creature.
The sea is old, but the blue sea is sudden.
The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,
each point of contact biggens and is gone.
And when it rains the senses fold in four.
No sky no sea - the whiteness is all one.
("Sea Sonnet")
Oswald also has love sonnets. In one, she writes of how, late at night, she sits in her “growing soap ball of silence.” But, the night and the solitude focus her words; she is a lonely recluse transformed into a modern day Ariel singing near the sea:
I just can't think and I don't want to know
whether I've lost my heart to my resilience;
not care, not speak - the clock, the book, the chair
and this one self, beyond sufficiency,
gone like an oyster to the ocean's floor
to make of love the pearl's cold quality. . .
I choose to think of you but I can't say
whether its peace or makeshift that I live
in this last hour of the millionth day
which ends like this, just breathing to survive.
And I don't know and so I haven't said
whether it's you or nothing in my head.
("Sonnet")
And with Ariel, there must also be magic nearby. Oswald is a master of the teasing image -- the vivid clue that often leaves the reader poised at the edge of the intangible, whether it be the sea (above), or the floating terror of a bicycle accident, or towels that operate as semaphores for love:
and us on bicycles - it was so fast
wheeling and turning we were lifted falling,
our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels
("April")
and my two eyes are floating in the fields,
my mouth is on a branch, my hair
is miles behind me making tributaries
and I have had my heart distracted out of me,
my skin is blowing slowly about without me
and now I have no hands and now I have no feet.
("Bike Ride on a Roman Road")
and if I love you this is incidental
as on the sand one blue towel, one white towel.
("Sea Sonnet")
In the collection's last piece, the long poem, “The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net,” Oswald turns to an 13th Century English folk tale about seven fishermen who went out to catch the moon, in order to prolong the spring. When they get back, they discover one is missing, presumed drown. But nobody has drowned, because each has not been counting himself.
In Oswald's retelling, instead of seven fisherman there is a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. It is the butcher who first hears the moon's call: “O the moon - how many miles” he said “to catch a moon?” The butcher gathers his two friends, and out to sea they head. As they row, each, with childlike wonder, asks questions (“What is the moon?”), or speculates on the elusive nature of the moon: “They say,” said Baker, “if you oil the moon / the night goes twice as fast as if you don't.” In time, they grow confused and realize that the “sea had mastered them”:
How many miles? How many miles from Gotham?
How many fish, feet, hands? They couldn't count.
They only knew the waves were twice as high
and twice as endless as they wished and each
stroke of the oar, each splash, the green-souled waves
came cold alive with pricks of phosphorus
and whispered messages of random numbers:
“Three men, three men of Gotham in a bowl,
the man of Gotham in the moon, the sea,
the six or seven common brittle stars,
and one was blind and two was terrified,
meganyctophanes, four men of Gotham
was hard to balance in a bowl, the moon,
it wasn't even safe to raise a finger
to make a tally of the crew but always
three men three men of Gotham in the moan,
the velvet swimming crab, the file, the flatworm. . .
And so the three argue, in nonsensical language, as to how many were in the boat (“one, two, halibu crackibu”). They are now lost. At this point a fourth ghostly figure (“now dim -- now clear”) appears:
I am Old Careit is my freezing round
to work these seas many miles out and in
I walk swim fly half like an oyster catcher
the shaky water under me always
In the next stanza, we are told that there “were three men of Gotham.” It appears they have passed on into a timeless realm, chasing their moon, asking their questions. Further on, an unnamed narrator thinks she sees them on the water:
as I came down through Gotham,
that light which the horizons of all seas
imply beyond - a kind of agitated
surreal and weightless curve - I saw it move
to close the space above a tiny boat
and in that boat, I thought I saw three men
and one was standing like a cormorant
who dries his wings; the spinning of the earth,
the wind, the sun were pulling them away.
I heard their voices on the waves: “Look up”
“what's that? “it's water” it's the moon how far?
how many miles is it? if we go on
beyond the crack of the horizon, wind
has broken down the moon.
And those three are no doubt still chasing the moon in a time beyond time. The reader will find in the mysterious and beautiful poetry of Alice Oswald a number of enchanting seas on which to sail, magical seashores to walk, and secret gardens to explore. In many ways, through her cadences, surreal imagery, and settings, Oswald's writing echos the nursery rhymes of childhood - only these nursery rhymes are for adults.
(A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Avatar Review. This particular collection is by now probably hard to find. Oswald includes many poems from this collection in her Spacecraft Voyager I: New and Selected Poems. But as I recall, not all. Oswald is a special poet, and this collection, though difficult to find, is well worth seeking out.)
Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.
Work knocks in me the winter's nail.
Oswald is able to transform her little sufferings into a kind of religious experience that is both contemplative and real, but also humorous, as she mocks herself before the Mediaeval kings with her Mediaeval “Pain” - with its allegorically capitalized “P”:
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly slowly in a creak of wings.
And I'd be staring, like one of those
cold holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
("Pruning in Frost")
Oswald's church is all around her. She finds her greenhouse is both a “hole” and the “sun's chapel,”even though it is raining outside. She marvels at what grows there:
Cucumbers, full of themselves,
the long green lungs of that still air,
image the fruits of staying put,
like water beetles in woodland puddles
and hoofprints.
Oswald also views herself as a hole. This is not a negative condition of being, but a willing abandonment of self, so that like her glass house chapel, she becomes filled with impressions of the physical world. She finds her delights in simple things. It is a kind of love that circles into her inner being while at the same time emanating outward, achieving a balance, much like prayer:
And I
am a hole in the glass house,
taking my time between the rows.
The leaves, the yellow blooms, the pots,
vanish through a loop of thoughts.
Some of the most beautiful poems of this collection can be found in Oswald's sonnets. Time and again she utilizes the repetition of words, such as “sea” and “moon” and “water” to great musical effect, particularly in a series of sea sonnets:
The sea crosses the sea, the sea has hooves;
the powers of rivers and the river's weir's curves
are moving in the wind-bent acts of waves.
And then the softer waters of the wells
and soakaways - hypostasis of holes,
which swallow up and sink for seven miles;
and then the boat arriving on the island
and nothing but the sea-like sea beyond.
("Sea Sonnet")
Oswald turns often to the sea in her poetry. In another sea sonnet, she startles the reader, pleasantly, with both imagery and inventive language. It is like sailing in a musical rainbow:
Grey, green and yellow, the sea and the weather
instantiate each other and the spectrum
turns in it like a perishable creature.
The sea is old, but the blue sea is sudden.
The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,
each point of contact biggens and is gone.
And when it rains the senses fold in four.
No sky no sea - the whiteness is all one.
("Sea Sonnet")
Oswald also has love sonnets. In one, she writes of how, late at night, she sits in her “growing soap ball of silence.” But, the night and the solitude focus her words; she is a lonely recluse transformed into a modern day Ariel singing near the sea:
I just can't think and I don't want to know
whether I've lost my heart to my resilience;
not care, not speak - the clock, the book, the chair
and this one self, beyond sufficiency,
gone like an oyster to the ocean's floor
to make of love the pearl's cold quality. . .
I choose to think of you but I can't say
whether its peace or makeshift that I live
in this last hour of the millionth day
which ends like this, just breathing to survive.
And I don't know and so I haven't said
whether it's you or nothing in my head.
("Sonnet")
And with Ariel, there must also be magic nearby. Oswald is a master of the teasing image -- the vivid clue that often leaves the reader poised at the edge of the intangible, whether it be the sea (above), or the floating terror of a bicycle accident, or towels that operate as semaphores for love:
and us on bicycles - it was so fast
wheeling and turning we were lifted falling,
our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels
("April")
and my two eyes are floating in the fields,
my mouth is on a branch, my hair
is miles behind me making tributaries
and I have had my heart distracted out of me,
my skin is blowing slowly about without me
and now I have no hands and now I have no feet.
("Bike Ride on a Roman Road")
and if I love you this is incidental
as on the sand one blue towel, one white towel.
("Sea Sonnet")
In the collection's last piece, the long poem, “The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net,” Oswald turns to an 13th Century English folk tale about seven fishermen who went out to catch the moon, in order to prolong the spring. When they get back, they discover one is missing, presumed drown. But nobody has drowned, because each has not been counting himself.
In Oswald's retelling, instead of seven fisherman there is a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. It is the butcher who first hears the moon's call: “O the moon - how many miles” he said “to catch a moon?” The butcher gathers his two friends, and out to sea they head. As they row, each, with childlike wonder, asks questions (“What is the moon?”), or speculates on the elusive nature of the moon: “They say,” said Baker, “if you oil the moon / the night goes twice as fast as if you don't.” In time, they grow confused and realize that the “sea had mastered them”:
How many miles? How many miles from Gotham?
How many fish, feet, hands? They couldn't count.
They only knew the waves were twice as high
and twice as endless as they wished and each
stroke of the oar, each splash, the green-souled waves
came cold alive with pricks of phosphorus
and whispered messages of random numbers:
“Three men, three men of Gotham in a bowl,
the man of Gotham in the moon, the sea,
the six or seven common brittle stars,
and one was blind and two was terrified,
meganyctophanes, four men of Gotham
was hard to balance in a bowl, the moon,
it wasn't even safe to raise a finger
to make a tally of the crew but always
three men three men of Gotham in the moan,
the velvet swimming crab, the file, the flatworm. . .
And so the three argue, in nonsensical language, as to how many were in the boat (“one, two, halibu crackibu”). They are now lost. At this point a fourth ghostly figure (“now dim -- now clear”) appears:
I am Old Careit is my freezing round
to work these seas many miles out and in
I walk swim fly half like an oyster catcher
the shaky water under me always
In the next stanza, we are told that there “were three men of Gotham.” It appears they have passed on into a timeless realm, chasing their moon, asking their questions. Further on, an unnamed narrator thinks she sees them on the water:
as I came down through Gotham,
that light which the horizons of all seas
imply beyond - a kind of agitated
surreal and weightless curve - I saw it move
to close the space above a tiny boat
and in that boat, I thought I saw three men
and one was standing like a cormorant
who dries his wings; the spinning of the earth,
the wind, the sun were pulling them away.
I heard their voices on the waves: “Look up”
“what's that? “it's water” it's the moon how far?
how many miles is it? if we go on
beyond the crack of the horizon, wind
has broken down the moon.
And those three are no doubt still chasing the moon in a time beyond time. The reader will find in the mysterious and beautiful poetry of Alice Oswald a number of enchanting seas on which to sail, magical seashores to walk, and secret gardens to explore. In many ways, through her cadences, surreal imagery, and settings, Oswald's writing echos the nursery rhymes of childhood - only these nursery rhymes are for adults.
(A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Avatar Review. This particular collection is by now probably hard to find. Oswald includes many poems from this collection in her Spacecraft Voyager I: New and Selected Poems. But as I recall, not all. Oswald is a special poet, and this collection, though difficult to find, is well worth seeking out.)
January 22, 2021
Take from me my voice and I shall voiceless go
to find you; take from me my face,
I’ll trek the hills invisibly,
my strength, and I shall run but keep no pace.
Even in cities, take the sense with which I reason
and I shall seek, but close it in your heart,
keep this and forget this
and this, when we’re apart,
will be the shadow game of love.
And I shall love in secret
and I shall love in crowds
and love in darkness, in the quiet
outlet of shadows, and in cities
as a ghost walking unnoticed,
and love with books, using their pages like a wind,
not reading, and with people, latticed
by words but through the lattice loving.
And when at last my love is understood,
with you I shall not love but breathe
and turn by breathing into flesh and blood.
September 17, 2024
That last long poem is brilliant. Definitely incredible diction. Interesting phrasing. Fascinating read. Not sure I’ve read any other poetry like this.
June 1, 2020
Apparently, when bicycles were first invented onlookers, thought that cyclists were literally flying above the ground such was their speed, grace and ease of movement. They were so shocked, the onlookers thought the cyclists to be demonic and possessed by the devil. Nothing could be that unnatural. Oswald masterfully captures the beauty and thrill of cycling in the free verse and fluidity of her poem, April: "and now we float in the fair blow of springtime,/ kingfishers, each astonishing the other/ to be a feathered nerve, to take the crack/ between the river's excess and the sun's."
A natural symbiosis lies between the speaker and nature throughout this collection. Just as a cyclist is comparable to a kingfisher, a man's resolve is listed in a series of similes likening him to rock and stone ("He felt as justified as a set slate"), and a speaker in Poem is absorbed and adopted by nature: "I run my fingers around my lip,/ transmuted to a bluebell cup."
However, whilst the speaker is generally seen to be at one with the natural yet unnatural world around her - for Oswald is incredibly skilled at creating a blurred, blended and fantastical world out of our surroundings - the speaker's role within it all is often minimised. She meditates within a glass house, yet although her thoughts swallow and are swallowed the dripping rain around her, her very presence is singular. She is a "hole within". In A Greyhound..., the poem I read in a Forward Anthology which inspired me to buy this collection, the speaker bolts for shelter in a storm. She listens to the rain. Her place within it all is just as significant as that of a dog let out and wandering free.
Oswald's reflections aren't limited just to nature. She writes a large number of sonnets, some focusing on the threshold between knowledge and the unknowing of love. Love is made out to be a fragile and impermanent thing. In Wedding, it all encompassing, yet also not. This isn't to say that Oswald's writing is fraught with paradoxes and anxiety; it manages to convey a cool yet hopeful tension. No more is this evident than in the (in my eyes) ultimate poem, Prayer. Here, the speaker petitions God in recognition of her own selfish soul, to just keep the world turning, the day to meet night, the senses of purpose and closure. In her plea, I can't help but feel reassured.
A sense of closure is also conveyed in a similar way in what really is the collection's final poem, a longer narrative piece that, like the chaotic and transfiguring sea it describes, blends the genres of fable and fairy tale into a magical, dream-like piece concerning three men who go out into the sea to capture the moon. The men, seeing dawn break, believe the moon has been broken down into small layers of gold leaf on the far off ocean's horizon. The journey is practically suicidal, the moon's promises merely figments of the men's imaginations, but Oswald again manages to convey that thrill, that excitement of fresh opportunities. Combine that with the fact that men (and this is also found in The Melon Grower) are single-minded in their pursuit of capturing elusive nature to the point of blindness (literal and metaphorical), it is perhaps also satisfying to see their efforts go awry.
A natural symbiosis lies between the speaker and nature throughout this collection. Just as a cyclist is comparable to a kingfisher, a man's resolve is listed in a series of similes likening him to rock and stone ("He felt as justified as a set slate"), and a speaker in Poem is absorbed and adopted by nature: "I run my fingers around my lip,/ transmuted to a bluebell cup."
However, whilst the speaker is generally seen to be at one with the natural yet unnatural world around her - for Oswald is incredibly skilled at creating a blurred, blended and fantastical world out of our surroundings - the speaker's role within it all is often minimised. She meditates within a glass house, yet although her thoughts swallow and are swallowed the dripping rain around her, her very presence is singular. She is a "hole within". In A Greyhound..., the poem I read in a Forward Anthology which inspired me to buy this collection, the speaker bolts for shelter in a storm. She listens to the rain. Her place within it all is just as significant as that of a dog let out and wandering free.
Oswald's reflections aren't limited just to nature. She writes a large number of sonnets, some focusing on the threshold between knowledge and the unknowing of love. Love is made out to be a fragile and impermanent thing. In Wedding, it all encompassing, yet also not. This isn't to say that Oswald's writing is fraught with paradoxes and anxiety; it manages to convey a cool yet hopeful tension. No more is this evident than in the (in my eyes) ultimate poem, Prayer. Here, the speaker petitions God in recognition of her own selfish soul, to just keep the world turning, the day to meet night, the senses of purpose and closure. In her plea, I can't help but feel reassured.
A sense of closure is also conveyed in a similar way in what really is the collection's final poem, a longer narrative piece that, like the chaotic and transfiguring sea it describes, blends the genres of fable and fairy tale into a magical, dream-like piece concerning three men who go out into the sea to capture the moon. The men, seeing dawn break, believe the moon has been broken down into small layers of gold leaf on the far off ocean's horizon. The journey is practically suicidal, the moon's promises merely figments of the men's imaginations, but Oswald again manages to convey that thrill, that excitement of fresh opportunities. Combine that with the fact that men (and this is also found in The Melon Grower) are single-minded in their pursuit of capturing elusive nature to the point of blindness (literal and metaphorical), it is perhaps also satisfying to see their efforts go awry.
October 4, 2018
My first introduction to the genius of Alice Oswald and I feel like my brain has been distilled. She defines the usual turning it into the sublime, she defines the sublime taking it to another level; there are images on these pages that will stay with me forever. It did take me a few readings of each poem to creep inbetween the layers but it has been worth it.
September 25, 2025
"It's when you've gone,
[...]
my voice, a pollen, dust, puffs out
the reason I remain:
here I give up the difficult dice
of friendship and I crook my knees
into a zed beneath the trees."
3.25 / 5 ⭐️
[...]
my voice, a pollen, dust, puffs out
the reason I remain:
here I give up the difficult dice
of friendship and I crook my knees
into a zed beneath the trees."
3.25 / 5 ⭐️
October 11, 2019
Some really beautiful poetry here. I found some of the poems rather complex and couldn't deduce their meanings easily but that says more about me than the poems I think!
Read
December 5, 2008This book was like no other poetry I had read. Spooky, breathless nature poetry that makes you look twice at nature, as though visiting an alien planet. Her language is compressed, musical and intense. This book is how I discovered Alice Oswald, and it remains among my very favorite volumes of poetry. If only the person I loaned it to would bring it back!
October 22, 2022
‘far and wide around him [the baker] could hear, / in all that toil of suction and secretion, / the bird-like stones calling under the breakers; / the pied stones and the grey and pigeon stones / and black and around and rolling and knocking / white-throated stones that warble in the wash. / “The sea is full,” he said, “not just of fish / but I can hear the winged souls of the drowned / transforming into pebbles”’
[…]
‘now [the candlestick maker] has hitched his heartbeat to the oars. / he rows by breathing, like a mower mows / dreaming a lawn through thirty parallels; / and as they pass the fishing boats, the wind / freshens and blows a circle on their necks / and everywhere the trees, all down the cliffs, / are running to them in a shape of waving / like haiku trees, staggering to keep up / the impetus of an extended instant, / and they can hear semi-attentively / the after-differences of the sea’
//
This 1996 debut bears traces – prophetic whispers – of its successors, Dart, Woods etc, and Sleepwalk on the Severn, and the first decade of Oswald's career naturally organises itself into the sustained development of an aesthetic treatise.
In 'Otter Out and In', we're told: 'there are times / when water's attentiveness / is tight enough to walk on / and we came so strangely / out of the darkness to this world / of watersounds colliding slowly, / out and in and disappear in darkness...' This notion of the 'attentiveness' of water, of its volition, of its inevitably capturing all that which sits outside or comes into contact with it, of its essential subsumption, is incredibly proto-Dart, and 'tight enough to walk on' so evokes the water's very constitution being this subsumptive quality.
Our coming 'so strangely / out of the darkness to this world / of watersounds colliding slowly' is, too, incredibly proto-Woods etc; the underlying formal mechanism beginning to work here is to bring the speaker out of the essential darkness (and muteness) of the world, and to build up, via 'watersounds colliding slowly', the soundscape of being. And it is a slow thing for Oswald, this business of 'being'; to inhabit a space, to be, is accretive – cumulative – rather than syntactic; and specifically, it is the accretion and apposition of sounds by which she achieves this: the 'watersounds colliding slowly' are the foundation laid upon the fundamental bedrock of silence – of 'darkness' – which begin to form our basic experience of 'this world'.
This basic sonic-texture of being is woven through the collection's final and longest poem, 'The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net'. I love this poem. The water's 'attentiveness', here, becomes something of a trap – the voices haunting its currents become a sort of mystic infection; as the Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker move through the ocean, the sounds almost grow louder, distorting, augmenting – the wise men begin to lose their grip on the actual. Time becomes distorted, as the poem's content seems to suggest the development of an excursion, while its form is resolutely committed to 'the impetus of an extended instant'. As the Candlestick Maker attempts to 'row by spells', we're told that 'under every sound' are 'the lines of water'; the wise men are attempting to traverse the page as well as the sea, but the sea is a series of dialectical noises and silences, and the lines are water – and what's more, the trees swaying on the bank are said to 'hear semi-attentively / the after-differences of sound on sea', displacing the waves into a semi-attended-to past-moment, an 'after-difference'. The noise-impressions cast the illusion of a fourth sailor onboard, and who are we to dissent? 'the sea / cannot be finished with; each layer is laid / co-terminous with light but more than light / and seamless and invisible.' We, as readers, feel at sea; we feel the scale of the water's indifference, the disorientation of its non-constitution. Indeed, we feel watched, we feel caught; our ears drowned, we are forced to agree with the Candlestick Maker: 'the moon herself / has caught us in a net.'
[…]
‘now [the candlestick maker] has hitched his heartbeat to the oars. / he rows by breathing, like a mower mows / dreaming a lawn through thirty parallels; / and as they pass the fishing boats, the wind / freshens and blows a circle on their necks / and everywhere the trees, all down the cliffs, / are running to them in a shape of waving / like haiku trees, staggering to keep up / the impetus of an extended instant, / and they can hear semi-attentively / the after-differences of the sea’
//
This 1996 debut bears traces – prophetic whispers – of its successors, Dart, Woods etc, and Sleepwalk on the Severn, and the first decade of Oswald's career naturally organises itself into the sustained development of an aesthetic treatise.
In 'Otter Out and In', we're told: 'there are times / when water's attentiveness / is tight enough to walk on / and we came so strangely / out of the darkness to this world / of watersounds colliding slowly, / out and in and disappear in darkness...' This notion of the 'attentiveness' of water, of its volition, of its inevitably capturing all that which sits outside or comes into contact with it, of its essential subsumption, is incredibly proto-Dart, and 'tight enough to walk on' so evokes the water's very constitution being this subsumptive quality.
Our coming 'so strangely / out of the darkness to this world / of watersounds colliding slowly' is, too, incredibly proto-Woods etc; the underlying formal mechanism beginning to work here is to bring the speaker out of the essential darkness (and muteness) of the world, and to build up, via 'watersounds colliding slowly', the soundscape of being. And it is a slow thing for Oswald, this business of 'being'; to inhabit a space, to be, is accretive – cumulative – rather than syntactic; and specifically, it is the accretion and apposition of sounds by which she achieves this: the 'watersounds colliding slowly' are the foundation laid upon the fundamental bedrock of silence – of 'darkness' – which begin to form our basic experience of 'this world'.
This basic sonic-texture of being is woven through the collection's final and longest poem, 'The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net'. I love this poem. The water's 'attentiveness', here, becomes something of a trap – the voices haunting its currents become a sort of mystic infection; as the Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker move through the ocean, the sounds almost grow louder, distorting, augmenting – the wise men begin to lose their grip on the actual. Time becomes distorted, as the poem's content seems to suggest the development of an excursion, while its form is resolutely committed to 'the impetus of an extended instant'. As the Candlestick Maker attempts to 'row by spells', we're told that 'under every sound' are 'the lines of water'; the wise men are attempting to traverse the page as well as the sea, but the sea is a series of dialectical noises and silences, and the lines are water – and what's more, the trees swaying on the bank are said to 'hear semi-attentively / the after-differences of sound on sea', displacing the waves into a semi-attended-to past-moment, an 'after-difference'. The noise-impressions cast the illusion of a fourth sailor onboard, and who are we to dissent? 'the sea / cannot be finished with; each layer is laid / co-terminous with light but more than light / and seamless and invisible.' We, as readers, feel at sea; we feel the scale of the water's indifference, the disorientation of its non-constitution. Indeed, we feel watched, we feel caught; our ears drowned, we are forced to agree with the Candlestick Maker: 'the moon herself / has caught us in a net.'
November 22, 2021
Alice Oswald’s The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile brought to mind Alain De Botton’s comments on how the things we value often get buried under the weight of the every day. I think that the value of some poets, like Alice Oswald, is their power to bring those values to the surface and forethought. They have the ability to reframe something familiar in a fresh fashion, which also aids in the sense of renewal and repositioning. In this collection, you can see the beginnings of Oswald’s later motifs and explorations.
I particularly enjoy reading her poetry aloud to myself, the pleasures of meter, sound and imagery. To share one such phrase - “There are times when water’s attentiveness is tight enough to walk on. “
A few of the poems in this collection that grabbed my attention were; Poem, Sonnet, Since lover is round, Sea Sonnet, Mountains, The Apple Shed and the longer poem – The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch The Moon in a Net.
I particularly enjoy reading her poetry aloud to myself, the pleasures of meter, sound and imagery. To share one such phrase - “There are times when water’s attentiveness is tight enough to walk on. “
A few of the poems in this collection that grabbed my attention were; Poem, Sonnet, Since lover is round, Sea Sonnet, Mountains, The Apple Shed and the longer poem – The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch The Moon in a Net.
December 15, 2021
This volume brings back some memories. The T.S. Eliot Prize, is quite young--the earliest award is from 1992-- This is something I read while between things at one point, perhaps over the summer, or during a fallow period, at one point. I haven't been much of a poetry reader, recently. The T.S. Eliot Prize winners, are however worth exploring. Recommended.
December 20, 2016
Oswald is a great poet in her emerging prime with already a wonderfully accomplished set of works behind her (Dart; Woods, etc.; Memorial, for example, and the remarkable new release Falling Awake). The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile was her first collection and it reads like anything but. There are closely observed poems of nature in wildlife and gardens, rivers and seas, with seamless shifts in perspective from the micro- to the telescopic and back with the vision of Whitman but the tone and eye of a scientist and the detail and elegant realism of a Vermeer. It is startling to know how much better she will get given how good she is so early. But there you have it, the combination of talent and craft, of immersion in worlds larger than oneself with such daring confidence and grace.
From the first poem, Pruning the Frost, to the last, a mini epic on the butcher, baker and candlestick maker of Gotham going to fish for the moon, the collection delights the mind and ear. Here is that first poem:
What her eyes catch her mind and imagination transform.
Here she is on the fecundity of spring, in a poem called April:
There are several poems where the narrator is arrived on the scene by bicycle, and others by walking on foot, paces of movement that don’t preclude noticing and stopping to notice more. The effect is as if the reader has been brought along with Oswald on her journeys. She finds the words to share not just the setting but the small drama of a stopped moment (“life’s ribbon frozen in mid-fling”) or the wind in our clothes (“our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels”) not just vivid but vital. You feel as if she has just pointed a finger to say there and you look and all that she says is there is there for you to view. There are poems of woods and seas, love and doubt, gardens and God.
The long poem, The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net, begins with author notes on the English folktale and two other sources for events to share her poem’s inspiration but the poem itself tacks in a very different direction. In Oswald’s hands the tale is no longer a sly children’s tale of a town’s effective con of a taxing king but a more challenging adult tale if superstition and ignorance, an allegory for life based on fantasy and fear. “The sea is high. They have climbed a black wave / into another world of three steps long / and overboard and only one step wide. / On either side of them a curve.” The world reduced to their row boat, to their live span, which is now at risk, as they cast nets, drifting further out to sea to ensnare the reflected moon that falls to bits of light when they draw their nets in. “There is no end to where we are. / People have sunk here. It isn’t water, / it’s fear of light, the proof of sea is fear.”
Through the night they row and cast and drift. In the morning they see dawn and the morning wind has broken down the moon into silver and gold handfuls, “’floating on the sea’ / ‘how shall we carry it?’ ‘we’ve got a bowl, / but it’s a sea that may go on some time— / give me the left oar, Baker—close your eyes / and when the journey ends, I’ll give a shout.’”
The collection’s penultimate poem, the one that precedes the Gotham tale, is called Prayer:
“Here I work in the hollow of God’s hand / with Time bent round my reach. I touch / the circle of the earth, I throw and catch / the sun and moon by turns into my mind. / I sense the length of it from end to end, / I sway me gently in my flesh and each / point of the process changes as I watch; / the flowers come, the rain follows the wind. // And all I ask is this—and you can see / how far the soul, when it goes under flesh, / is not a soul, is small and creaturish— / that every day the sun comes silently / to set my hands to work and that the moon / turns and returns to meet me when it’s done.”
From the first poem, Pruning the Frost, to the last, a mini epic on the butcher, baker and candlestick maker of Gotham going to fish for the moon, the collection delights the mind and ear. Here is that first poem:
“Last night, without a sound, / a ghost of a world lay down on a world, // trees like dream-wrecks / coralled with increments of frost. // Found crevices / and wound and wound / the clock-spring cobwebs. // All life’s ribbon frozen in mid-fling. // Oh I am / stone thumbs, / feet of glass. // Work knocks in me the winter’s nail. // I can imagine / Pain, turned heron, / could fly off slowly in a creak of wings. // And I’d be staring, like one of those / cold-holy and granite kings, / getting carved into this effigy of orchard.”
What her eyes catch her mind and imagination transform.
Here she is on the fecundity of spring, in a poem called April:
“The sheer grip and the push of it—growth gets / a footledge in the loosest stems, it takes / the litterings of weeds and clocks them round; / your eyeballs bud and alter and you can’t / step twice in the same foot—I know a road, / the curve throws it one way and another; / somebody slipped the gears and bucketed slowly / into the hawthorns and his car took root / and in its bonnet now, amazing flowers // appear and fade and quiddify the month; / and us on bicycles—it was so fast / wheeling and turning we were lifted falling, / our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels…/ and now we float in the fair blow of springtime, / kingfishers, each astonishing the other / to be a feathered nerve, to take the crack / between the river’s excess and the sun’s.”
There are several poems where the narrator is arrived on the scene by bicycle, and others by walking on foot, paces of movement that don’t preclude noticing and stopping to notice more. The effect is as if the reader has been brought along with Oswald on her journeys. She finds the words to share not just the setting but the small drama of a stopped moment (“life’s ribbon frozen in mid-fling”) or the wind in our clothes (“our blue-sky jackets filling up like vowels”) not just vivid but vital. You feel as if she has just pointed a finger to say there and you look and all that she says is there is there for you to view. There are poems of woods and seas, love and doubt, gardens and God.
The long poem, The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net, begins with author notes on the English folktale and two other sources for events to share her poem’s inspiration but the poem itself tacks in a very different direction. In Oswald’s hands the tale is no longer a sly children’s tale of a town’s effective con of a taxing king but a more challenging adult tale if superstition and ignorance, an allegory for life based on fantasy and fear. “The sea is high. They have climbed a black wave / into another world of three steps long / and overboard and only one step wide. / On either side of them a curve.” The world reduced to their row boat, to their live span, which is now at risk, as they cast nets, drifting further out to sea to ensnare the reflected moon that falls to bits of light when they draw their nets in. “There is no end to where we are. / People have sunk here. It isn’t water, / it’s fear of light, the proof of sea is fear.”
Through the night they row and cast and drift. In the morning they see dawn and the morning wind has broken down the moon into silver and gold handfuls, “’floating on the sea’ / ‘how shall we carry it?’ ‘we’ve got a bowl, / but it’s a sea that may go on some time— / give me the left oar, Baker—close your eyes / and when the journey ends, I’ll give a shout.’”
The collection’s penultimate poem, the one that precedes the Gotham tale, is called Prayer:
“Here I work in the hollow of God’s hand / with Time bent round my reach. I touch / the circle of the earth, I throw and catch / the sun and moon by turns into my mind. / I sense the length of it from end to end, / I sway me gently in my flesh and each / point of the process changes as I watch; / the flowers come, the rain follows the wind. // And all I ask is this—and you can see / how far the soul, when it goes under flesh, / is not a soul, is small and creaturish— / that every day the sun comes silently / to set my hands to work and that the moon / turns and returns to meet me when it’s done.”
May 8, 2024
Hmm, just Hmm....
January 3, 2025
A beautiful collection of nature poems. So moreish and absolutely beautiful. I loved every word in this book. I am looking forward to reading Memorial, which is a next read!!!
September 8, 2013
I've been meaning to read Alice Oswald for long enough now that it made sense to start at the beginning, wandering my way through her wooded world reflected in water. I fell in immediately.
There is something about Oswald's unexpected hyphenation, like German compound nouns translated into English dash-dash-dashes. There is something about her passionate dalliance with nature, with language, that feels like falling, nothing visible but sky and wildflowers, and they've tangled together into something unnameable but undeniable.
Yes, that's it: Oswald sees, senses, recognizes life everywhere. For her, the road is "riding a bone bicycle through my head." Woods are full of "wishbone trees." She imagines the moon wooing her reflection because they "know each other's nothingness, / are lonely, like the blues beyond / (the sea-ghost turning its mirrors under the sky-ghost)." Her sonnets celebrate love, yes, but also place, and change, life persisting through time. Wavelets lapping, estuaries reinventing themselves at low and high tide. "Touch me the moment where these worlds collide, / the river's cord unravelled by the tide..." Even her shadows breathe, shudder and sing:
The collection closes with a longer piece, "The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net," which rocks and shivers with reflective seasickness. I struggled to follow the narrative all the way through, but perhaps that is as it ought to be in a boat rowed by moonstruck men who can't count themselves and can't count on themselves anymore "as if they'd anchored on the interface / between two wastelands — life and fear of life," only the sea and the moon winking out like a blinded eye. So much terrible beauty. "'O moon,' said Candle, 'be extraordinary.'" And it was.
Pruning in Frost
Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,
trees like dream-wrecks
coralled with increments of frost.
Found crevices
and wound and wound
the clock-spring cobwebs.
All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling.
Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.
Work knocks in me the winter's nail.
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.
And I'd be staring, like one of those
cold-holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
There is something about Oswald's unexpected hyphenation, like German compound nouns translated into English dash-dash-dashes. There is something about her passionate dalliance with nature, with language, that feels like falling, nothing visible but sky and wildflowers, and they've tangled together into something unnameable but undeniable.
Woman in a Mustard Field
From love to light my element
was altered when I fled
out of your house to meet the space
that blows about my head.
The sun was rude and sensible,
the rivers ran for hours
and whoops I found a mustard field
exploding into flowers;
and I slowly came to sense again
the thousand forms that move
all summer through a living world
that grows without your love.
Yes, that's it: Oswald sees, senses, recognizes life everywhere. For her, the road is "riding a bone bicycle through my head." Woods are full of "wishbone trees." She imagines the moon wooing her reflection because they "know each other's nothingness, / are lonely, like the blues beyond / (the sea-ghost turning its mirrors under the sky-ghost)." Her sonnets celebrate love, yes, but also place, and change, life persisting through time. Wavelets lapping, estuaries reinventing themselves at low and high tide. "Touch me the moment where these worlds collide, / the river's cord unravelled by the tide..." Even her shadows breathe, shudder and sing:
Ballad of a Shadow
Take from me my voice and I shall voiceless go
to find you; take from me my face,
I'll trek the hills invisibly,
my strength, and I shall run but keep no pace.
Even in cities, take the sense with which I reason
and I shall seek, but close it in your heart,
keep this and forget this
and this, when we're apart,
will be the shadow game of love.
And I shall love in secret
and I shall love in crowds
and love in darkness, in the quiet
outlet of shadows, and in cities
as a ghost walking unnoticed,
and love with books, using their pages like a wind,
not reading, and with people, latticed
by words but through the lattice loving.
And when at last my love is understood,
with you I shall not love but breathe
and turn by breathing into flesh and blood.
The collection closes with a longer piece, "The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net," which rocks and shivers with reflective seasickness. I struggled to follow the narrative all the way through, but perhaps that is as it ought to be in a boat rowed by moonstruck men who can't count themselves and can't count on themselves anymore "as if they'd anchored on the interface / between two wastelands — life and fear of life," only the sea and the moon winking out like a blinded eye. So much terrible beauty. "'O moon,' said Candle, 'be extraordinary.'" And it was.
February 3, 2013
Is there such a thing as a micromicroclimate, a kind of personal weather that is half imaginary? This is natural, violent beauty; writing that is weirdly elemental, as if it is part of "outside" and is to be read "outside." It requires the reader to create impossible ways to measure things that are impossible to measure. It is difficult enough that it dares you to understand.
The lasting dynamic impression of this book is a multisensual drama that goes something like this. First, the speaker's voice rings out into a woodland scene, field, etc. It ricochets off of bark, pings off of bracken, in verbs and sound that are deployed in surprising ways. (It seems vaguely probable that if there were to be a fifth season, the phrases here could be responsible.) It's as if reading means: to send words out in sorties, on a reconnaissance of immanence, to learn things. The words boomerang "back" to the speaker, and, after having changed us, change her.
"Sonnet" and "[since love is round and man misshapen]" are eloquent nightmares, emotional grafts, embraceable paper blades.
The lasting dynamic impression of this book is a multisensual drama that goes something like this. First, the speaker's voice rings out into a woodland scene, field, etc. It ricochets off of bark, pings off of bracken, in verbs and sound that are deployed in surprising ways. (It seems vaguely probable that if there were to be a fifth season, the phrases here could be responsible.) It's as if reading means: to send words out in sorties, on a reconnaissance of immanence, to learn things. The words boomerang "back" to the speaker, and, after having changed us, change her.
"Sonnet" and "[since love is round and man misshapen]" are eloquent nightmares, emotional grafts, embraceable paper blades.
July 10, 2016
Nii sobiv suveks: kividest, aedadest, õuntest... Lõpuks ka pikem ballaad kolmest mehest, kes lähevad merele kuud püüdma. Imetore.
April 19, 2017
We are lucky to live in a world where apples are named so gloriously and Cox & Bramley juice is mailed from London. Mostly, we are very lucky:
And now the comfortable dropping sound
of rain as heavy as a shower of apples:
Ribston Pippin, Cox's Orange,
Woolbrook Russet, Sturmer Pippin,
Bramley, Crispin, Margil, Spartan,
Beauty of Bath and Merton Beauty...
Put them bright in rows. Tell me
what have our souls been growing all these years
of time taken and rendered back as apples?
(from The Apple Shed, Spring appropriate even tho the first poem, "Pruning in Frost", stands as my fav
And now the comfortable dropping sound
of rain as heavy as a shower of apples:
Ribston Pippin, Cox's Orange,
Woolbrook Russet, Sturmer Pippin,
Bramley, Crispin, Margil, Spartan,
Beauty of Bath and Merton Beauty...
Put them bright in rows. Tell me
what have our souls been growing all these years
of time taken and rendered back as apples?
(from The Apple Shed, Spring appropriate even tho the first poem, "Pruning in Frost", stands as my fav
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