{"id":61,"date":"2012-01-23T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T20:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=61"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:36:58","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:36:58","slug":"william-bedford-reviews-alice-oswalds-memorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/william-bedford-reviews-alice-oswalds-memorial\/","title":{"rendered":"William Bedford reviews Alice Oswald's 'Memorial'"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alice Oswald, Memorial<\/span><\/a> (Faber and Faber, 2011) pp.84, \u00a312.99p<\/span>


Alice Oswald\u2019s<\/span> Memorial<\/span> is \u201ca translation of the <\/span>Iliad<\/span>\u2019s atmosphere, not its story\u201d. That Oswald is a classicist \u2013 she read classics at New College, Oxford \u2013 and a distinguished poet herself is obvious throughout this exciting work. Critics since Arnold have tended to praise the Iliad for its nobility, but in attempting to recreate the atmosphere Oswald is concerned with what ancient critics called Homer\u2019s enargeia<\/span>, or \u201cbright unbearable reality\u201d. <\/span>

To achieve this <\/span>enargeia<\/span>, she has abandoned the Iliad\u2019s narrative drive in what she uneasily describes as a \u201creckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem\u201d. But the focus on brief biographies of the dead derives from the Greek tradition of lament poetry, and the similes owe their form to pastoral lyric. Opening with a list of over two-hundred names of the dead, <\/span>Memorial<\/span> \u201cpresents the whole poem as a kind of oral cemetery\u201d, with the inevitability of death removing any possibility for narrative drama. But it is precisely this accumulating elegiac effect which creates the \u201cunbearable reality\u201d Oswald is trying to evoke. <\/span>

An example will have to serve to give a sense of this extraordinary work:<\/span>

Come back to your city SOCUS<\/span>
Your father is a rich man a breeder of horses<\/span>
And your house has deep decorated baths and long passages<\/span>
But he and his brother weren\u2019t listening<\/span>
Like men on wire walking over the underworld<\/span>
CHAROPS died first killed by Odysseus<\/span>
Then Socus who was running by now<\/span>
Felt the rude punch of a spear in his back<\/span>
Push through his heart and out the other side poor Socus<\/span>
Trying to get away from his own ending<\/span>
Ran out his last moments in fear of the next ones<\/span>
But this is it now this is the mud of Troy<\/span>
This is black wings coming down every evening<\/span>
Bird\u2019s feathers on your face<\/span>
Unmaking you mouthful by mouthful<\/span>
Eating your eyes your open eyes<\/span>
Which your mother should have closed<\/span>

Like when the wind comes ruffling at last to sailors adrift<\/span>
Trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles<\/span>
And lever and lift those well-rubbed oars<\/span>
Making tiny dents in the ocean<\/span>

Like when the wind comes ruffling at last to sailors adrift<\/span>
Trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles<\/span>
And lever and lift those well-rubbed oars<\/span>
Making tiny dents in the ocean<\/span>


A family comes alive in the memorial lament, but the facts of death could apply to any fallen warrior, even the absence of conventional punctuation helping to generalise the experience. Oswald has chosen an almost prosaic language to register the horrors, a form of courtesy allowing the horror of the last five lines their full force. A force given added dignity and gravity by the repeated similes, a kind of Greek chorus commenting dispassionately on the details of the lament, again serving to generalise the experience. <\/span>

Memorial<\/span> is a lament for the dead of all wars: the friends who die side by side \u201cIn a daze of loneliness\/Their conversation unfinished\u201d; the boy who was a famous hunter but dies \u201cWanting to be light again\/Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted\/And carried on a hip\u201d; an only child whose loving parents \u201cdidn\u2019t think he would die\/But a spear stuck through his eye\/He sat down backwards\/Trying to snatch back the light\/With stretched out hands\u201d; a young warrior full of life \u201cRunning at a man thinking kill kill\u201d only to die himself, and be left so that \u201cIn years to come someone will find his helmet\/Shaped like a real head.\u201d <\/span>

Oswald succeeds magnificently in evoking a \u201cbright unbearable reality\u201d which has chilling relevance for us today. It is a reality where everybody is \u201cSomebody\u2019s darling son\u201d; the orders for massacre clang with dreadful familiarity: \u201ckill them all\/Even the unborn ones in their mothers\u2019 bellies\u201d; men who were \u201cnot really\u201d fighters at all but \u201cmore\u201d farmers floundering clumsily on the battle-fields until death \u201cTin-opened them out of their armour\u201d. <\/span>

A live performance of <\/span>Memorial<\/span> would be an astonishing event. The force of the repeated similes only fully comes to life when read aloud and following their individual laments. And even here, Oswald shows her technical mastery. Hector\u2019s is the last death to be lamented, but Hector \u201cdied like everyone else\u201d, a passing remark which reveals the deeper significance of the work. And as if to allow the poem to enter our memories forever, the similes which follow Hector\u2019s death are not repeated, but printed singly page-by-page, surrounded by the white silences of death. We can hear the gradual fading of the voices. But they are not gone. <\/span>
This is truly the terror of war: <\/span>

Like when a dolphin powered by hunger<\/span>
Swims into the harbour<\/span>
Thousands of light-storms of little fish<\/span>
Flit away to the water-shaken wall-shadow<\/span>
And hang there trembling.<\/span>


<\/font><\/p>\n

….reviewed by William Bedford<\/a>
<\/font><\/div>\n


<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alice Oswald, Memorial (Faber and Faber, 2011) pp.84, \u00a312.99pAlice Oswald\u2019s Memorial is \u201ca translation of the Iliad\u2019s atmosphere, not its story\u201d. That Oswald is a classicist \u2013 she read classics at New College, Oxford \u2013 and a distinguished poet herself is obvious throughout this exciting work. Critics since Arnold have tended to praise the Iliad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23755,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/23755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}