Weeds and Wild Flowers

by Alice Oswald

"Weeds and Wild Flowers" is a magical meeting of the poems of Alice Oswald and the etchings of Jessica Greenman. Within its pages, everyday flora take on an extraordinary life, jostling tragically at times, at times comically, for a foothold in a busying world. Stunningly visualised and skilfully animated, this imaginative collaboration beckons us toward a landscape of botanical characters, and invites us to see ourselves among them.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Art, Nonfiction

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Alice 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.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of etchings and a series of poems shuffled together… with the shared central idea that plants resemble us. This might sound sugary but it's not! Uncomfortable throughout, with its richly sensuous descriptions, and at times dark and even menacing, this collection of personalities and figures invokes disgust and sympathy.

Humanising plants or painting people as vegetation, Oswald and Greenman ultimately succeed in enlarging the humanity of the reader, who must overcome revulsion to feel for these characters, at whom the authors will not tempt us to sneer.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for that wondrous poem ‘Snowdrop' alone.

[Ярослава]

Необов'язкова, але мила маленька збірочка віршів Еліс Освальд (лауреатки премії Т.С.Еліота 1997 р.) і гравюр Джессіки Ґрінман. Ґрінман зображає рослини подекуди в естетиці ботанічного альбома десь так доби Просвітництва, подекуди з явними кивками до пізніших творів і традицій (скажімо, ван Гог там десь вчувається). Еліс Освальд пише вірші, уявляючи антропоморфну персоніфікацію рослин, чи бодай їхніх назв. Завдання якось так у передмові окреслює: "My hope is that the experience of reading and looking at the book will be a slightly unsettling pleasure, like walking through a garden at night, when the plants come right up to the edges of their names and then beyond them".

Якось так звучать вірші: "Too rushed, / too slender / is Slender Rush. / Prematurely wrinkled / pale hands / holding bags / hastily filled. / From the morning / to the evening / and back again" (Slender Rush - ситник тонкий по-нашому).
Чи от шипшина: "She could be any woman at all, / caught off-guard on-guard. [...] Eaten away by outwardness, / her eyes are empty", етц.

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was going to begin this review with a pointed remark about how tiresome I find conversations about the death of the book, but realized that would require me to engage with those conversations in ways I find extremely tiresome, and the real point here is that Weeds and Wild Flowers is a beautiful book best appreciated in physical form. It's necessary to run your fingers over Jessica Greenman's etchings, though they've been reproduced in this Faber edition using techniques that don't allow you to feel the imprint of the plate on the paper. It's vital to see facing pages simultaneously, to wonder about the juxtaposition of Alice Oswald's poem "Pale Persicaria" with Greenman's "Window."

Some of the etchings replicate or respond directly to the poems, but many of the connections are more oblique. I like this about the book. It begins with explanatory notes from both writer and artist explaining in very different ways how this is really two books in one. Oswald charmingly admits that, although it is not "a reliable guide to wild flowers, [...] it may be a reliable record of someone's wild or wayside selves." Greenman, by contrast, is detailed, practical and specific about her weeds and wildflowers, her process of creation. Mostly it's up to us to explore and ruminate on any commonalities (or divergences) we see threading these linguistic and visual works of art together.

For the past few months I've been reading Oswald's collections of poetry chronologically, my expectations high and mostly met or exceeded. She has a remarkable relationship with words both as signifiers made up of signifiers, symbolic and sibilant, and as sounds that leave our mouths and take on an audible life of their own. There is so much going on in these stylistically diverse (but distinctively Oswaldian) poems that I hesitate to pass any kind of judgment — and I have no idea how many readings, aloud or in the loud silence of my head, would make me feel confident in my impressions of them. I do feel safe saying that, for the most part, I connected more with fragments than entire poems, however vividly those flower-faced people come to life. ("It looks endless. / A silvery bewilderness." "He has enormous jaws, chewing on silence.") I love that she witnesses the primrose's death on April the seventeenth."Violet" is a good example of a poem I don't particularly care for that contains some gobsmackingly beautiful lines:

Finally she mentioned
the name of her name

which was something so pin-sharp,
in such a last gasp of a previously unknown language,

it could only be spoken as a scent,
it could only be heard as our amazement.

When I encounter language like this, I'm taken back to the first time I read James Joyce and felt his joy in words, in life, in love, in the connections between them, and wanted nothing more than to live in those words myself. It's strange to think that Oswald can articulate my weirdly physical response to such beauty with her account of a flower-as-person that never existed but can be found in many places.

Anyway, here is my favorite of the bunch, a softer, meeker poem than many of its companions, but the one that brings spring to my winter, satisfyingly traditional in its rhymes and sentiment:

Snowdrop

A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed,
whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl
of fine white wool, has suddenly appeared
in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall.
She may not last. She has no strength at all,
but stoops and shakes as if she'd stood all night
on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.

One among several hundred clear-eyed ghosts
who get up in the cold and blink and turn
into these trembling emblems of night frosts,
she brings her burnt heart with her in an urn
of ashes, which she opens to re-mourn,
having no other outlet to express
her wild-flower sense of wounded gentleness.

Yes, she's no more now than a drop of snow
on a green stem — her name is now her calling.
Her mind is just a frozen melting glow
of water swollen to the point of falling,
which maybe has no meaning. There's no telling.
But what a beauty, what a mighty power
of patience kept intact is now in flower.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

god damn lmao. congrats to alice oswald for being the first poet i've read who elegantly uses the word 'burp' in a poem: “Lost ghost Queen / of the Unbetween / it’s lovely listening / to the burp / of mud as / she sinks her / feet right in.” oswald pays such an exquisite amount of attention to sound work & repetition, which really

i've been feeling kinda Bad lately about my love for the wild iris since gluck's nobel acceptance speech. and tbh i kept thinking about TWI while reading this. except this is way better and TWI does not compare. like wow. the sound. the lines. so many good lines:

"Daisy":
“I will push my nail
into her neck and make
a lovely necklace out of her green bones."

how beautiful and brutal. now THAT is a good way to use the word 'bones' in a poem

"Bristly Ox-tongue":
“This is Bristly Ox-tongue.
Long silence.
He has enormous jaws, chewing on silence.
He has enormous jaws, chewing on silence.”

may i have this good a sense of knowing when a line bears repeating

"Violet":
“while we all stood there saying, ‘Violet! Violet!’
fingering her blue bruised skin. 
Finally she mentioned
the name of her name 
which was something so pin-sharp,
in such a last gasp of a previously unknown language, 
it could only be spoken as a scent,
it could only be heard as our amazement.”

inevitably thought of mary oliver's "married to amazement" line, what a good word and a good way to use it

"Procumbent Cinquefoil":
“A carcass of stalks
through whose ribs the moon falls
like water
to the creeping base of everything.”

what a New way to describe moonlight shining on plants. wow

desperately wish i also had a hard copy of this poem because the drawings are BEAUTIFUL and i want them so bad

[R.C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to the binding, the theme, and Jessica Greenman’s gorgeous artwork, the book itself is really lovely. Unfortunately, while Alice Oswald predictively impresses with her mastery of the word in every piece, every single poem turns it’s botanical subject into someone bitter, sad, or otherwise negatively portrayed. There is hardly any happiness or levity to be found in this work. Not that every bit of writing about flowers needs to be light and cheerful — far from it! But for every poem to be a “womp-womp” weighed down the whole experience for me.

[Hanneleele]

It's really lovely to see etching in illustration but it would be a different thing in a physical book: I'm sure my e-reader does not do the art justice. Poetry was fun as well but I like some of her other collections more.

Tore ikka oforti illustratsioonis näha, ent tahaks raamatut käes hoida: paber, prindikvaliteet jms võib sellele nii palju juurde anda või ära võtta, luger igatahes pole see. Luuletused on vahvad, ent "Dart" või "Severn" on märksa muljetavaldavamad.

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a major statement but a charming, entertaining and occasionally sinister collection. Anything from Alice Oswald is always welcome and the pictures are a good match. Though the less botanical amongst us (like me) would appreciate captions giving an impression as to which picture is of what flower. There’s an index but I only discovered that as I finished the book 🙄

[Imge · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 stars) I love it when literature and visual arts come together.

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some lovely poetry and the accompanying etchings are beautiful.

[La Urraca Azul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Oswald es por lejos una de mis poetas favoritas

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collaboration- amazing illustrations and some wonderful poems too!

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5***

"(...) the
only word she
speaks is ‘yellow' ”

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charity shop find and a lovely book.

[Rosie Frasc · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful collection! Alice Oswald is an absolute revelation, I think she’s subtle and brilliant and her words are so evocative.

[S.M. Jenkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems are exquisite, some I couldn't connect to at all.
Daisy had an excellent combination of beauty and the macabre, violet beautifully described and sensual, snowdrop was haunting.

I didn't much care for Stinking Goose foot.

Good variety of moods evoked in this collection, beautifully illustrated.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's possible that if I read more 20th-century British poetry, Alice Oswald's poems might not sound so distinct to my ear, so unlike any other poet I've read lately. But be that as it may, she's becoming one of my favorite younger poets. I enjoyed her book-length poem Dart -- a sort of collage of voices mapping the river Dart from its source on Dartmoor to its plunge into the English Channel -- very much, as I did many of her shorter poems gathered in Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems. This collection is something of a departure: each of the poems is named after a weed or wildflower, and each one personifies the plant as a character who's both human and botanical. There's Slender Rush, who's always rushing; Fragile Glasswort, who's having a nervous breakdown; Rambling Rose ("what she's really after / is to wander"); Hairy Bittercress, who "ought to drink less"; Thrift, who was "Born by the sea" and is "Used to its no-hope moan". (The marvelous plant names are part of the fun of this book.)

When I first read about the premise of this book, I was a bit worried that it might turn out to be kind of twee -- but I shouldn't have worried at all. There's a lot of sly comedy in these poems, and some stunning imagery: Yellow Iris, "a woman / from a previous / world," has "one / gold-webbed glove, / one withered hand." Lily of the Valley stands looking down at a river, "The very tip of the cone / down which heaven was endlessly trickling." I'm particularly fond of the stuttering repetitions of "Bristly Ox-tongue":

It is Bristly Ox-tongue,
too shy to speak.
Long silence.
It is Bristly Ox-tongue.

Who stands rooted
With his white hair uncombed.
Long silence.
He stands rooted.
...
This is no good.
He has come indoors in his boots
and anyhow, his hands are more like hooves.
This is no good.

The poems are accompanied by etchings by Jessica Greenman, which are lovely, though to my mind the poems are more compelling. I think they're going to stay with me for some time.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Alice Oswald states at the beginning of the book, this is two books shuffled together. The etchings do not match the poems. They are just on the same theme. I feel I need to know more about the plants spoken of in this volume(their workings/the folktales attached to them) to fully appreciate the poems. I googled a picture of each plant that I wasnt sure of and then read the corresponding poem. I enjoyed doing it like this and I learned as I went along. I really like the personification of the plants. However, I will never make another daisy chain ever! Never again will I "push my nail/into her neck and make/a lovely necklace out of her green bones."

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating evocations of plants as people, using aspects of their appearance and names to conjure up qualities. The connections are powerful transformative and reflect an experience of the world that I share, but do take place in a rather innocent space of 'wild and wayside selves' These are worth re-reading.

Re-read December 2022 and enjoyed them more. It would be difficult for someone who didn't know the flowers I think, although quite a bit is based on the names.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

[Leanne Radojkovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oswald does something witchy and wonderful with language - she makes the metal of words bend, as if made from putty...so everything seems to be half in and half out of being.