essay
Alice Oswald’s Language of Water
When Alice Oswald’s Spacecraft Voyager I—the “new and selected poems” from Graywolf—appeared in 2007, I didn’t know anyone around me who was reading it, though it came adorned with some UK prize ribbons and quotes comparing her to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Geoffrey Hill among ‘contemporaries’, and Hopkins and Dylan Thomas to boot. Hailing from Devon, England, she was, in these assessments, a poet of the genius Loci who combined, somehow, a notational looseness with tight lyric rhythms, a prosody rooted in casual speech, precise descriptive observation of the natural world, and a playfulness weighted by the ballast of folk traditions, and all strung to be sung. What caught my ear from the first was her mind for metaphor—what is a poem if not a craft for traversing space, a made thing crafted for epic distances: Spacecraft Voyager I did not strike me as a neo-Georgian signal of revamped pastoralism, but more like a figure cutting a path to us through Homer.
“Trust a boat on the high seas,” Oswald quotes Conrad in her Oxford lecture, “to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion” (“An Interview with Water,” 7.8.20). This intimation (from Lord Jim) of water’s psychic volume and movement within us we find first in Homer, in the figure of storms raging inside of us to match those that throw mortals off their homeward course. But in 2007, I was thinking about a tributary, not an ocean, or even a river—Rock Creek, which runs its course from Maryland north of Washington D.C., through the Capital, and into the Potomac on its way to Cheseapeake Bay.
As a minor watercourse in the region’s nesting watersheds, Rock Creek had more imaginative pull for me than the grander Potomac with its storied role in the nation’s history; it was a part of my day-to-day life—I live just a few minutes’ walk from it; and its gossip and secrets appeared more marginal, tucked away, and enticing than those by the larger bodies of water around me: the unknown proximate beckoned, tickling the ear. But I had no idea how to approach the writing of a longish poem I knew I wanted to try my hand at. Alice Oswald’s Spacecraft arrived then as one of the vessels to hold as exemplary model. From the beginning, she was obsessed with water and searching for a language and a form for it. In her first book, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), we find three “Sea Sonnets”, an “Estuary Sonnet,” and a longish water tale, “Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net.”
The Sea had mastered them. They couldn’t make
even the simplest sense of what they witnessed:
The moon, the birds, the crooked boat. They moved
far out between absurdity and wonder,
rocking like figures in a nursery rhyme,
the waves like great smooth beasts shoving them on.
Oswald has a bit of what Robert Pinsky hears in the work of Elizabeth Bishop as “prose virtues.” And like Bishop, she’s a master of rhythm—if you hear the acoustic correspondence between the phrases “nursery rhyme” and “shoving them on” it’s due to the parallel rhythms at the line-ends. And just as Bishop tends to involve her sentences in acts of syntactic enfolding, Oswald stretches out, even in a tight sonnet, only to bend forward or back, recursively.
So I have made a little moon-like hole
with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass
I watch the weather make the sea my soul,
which is a space performed on by a space;
and where it rains, the very integer
and shape of water disappears in water.
(Sea Sonnet, first)
Water naturally, famously, has no shape; its coursing and swelling changes in a state of constant self-dissolving and self-joining, self-integration. It is the phenomenal embodiment of open form. There is an unvoiced triple end-rhyme here, as the object of the soul, glimpsed through a hole, leads to a homophonic wholeness hidden in the integer, or whole set, the element that cannot be divided from itself any more than the soul or space can be divided: by definition, it’s what’s untouchable.
Poetic acts, however, make such discernments, and stage perceptions of difference and unity—the element of water becomes, for Oswald, one of essential conductivity and connection, the element of poetry: a skimming stone, for example, that the poet throws sinks as she feels her feet become wet, which connects to a “a heron’s foot / lifting water” and a mud-flat holding “some old shipwreck.” Separate phenomena, in seemingly separate elemental worlds (water, air, earth) are one—the risk here is banality; but the poet pushes deeper by locating such indivisibility in the human mind:
Touch me the moment where these worlds collide,
the river’s cord unravelled by the tide . . .
and I will show you nothing—neither high
nor low nor salt nor fresh—only the skill
of tiny creatures like the human eye
to live by water, which is never still.
(Estuary Sonnet)
Rhyme enacts the separating and joining, the distinctions within the integers of water, just as the limpid braiding of Oswald’s supple pentameters (its “cords”) evokes the contradictory sensation of stillness and movement, surface and depth. (The poem becomes especially intensely alive for me in the penultimate line, where the single perceptive organ of the human eye becomes its own animal).
So this was one kind of language for water, written (I’m guessing) in the poet’s late twenties (she was born in 1966). You can hear the music and rhetorical structures in such lines drawing from the anonymous Border ballads and older riddles (“neither high / nor low nor salt nor fresh”) up through Spenser’s wedding poems with their long lines of mellifluous refrain.
Six years later we get Dart, a longish poem set on the eponymous river—and in a sense about, or of, the river—that runs through Devon and (as a poem) stretches out prosodically while opening up conceptually and in the framework of what it aims to include. Oswald (who often establishes a point of reference, or several, in a poem’s prefatory note) emphasizes that “this poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart”—a kind of social history sourced from field recordings Oswald made over a period of a few years that she then used as “life models” for character sketches, “linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea [ . . . ] All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.” (Oswald’s championing of performance, the way she thinks about it as an integral part of her practice as a poet, often leads to the inclusion of such stage directions).
The river’s “mutterings,” its music and musing, subsume and absorb the individual voices, shaped by region and circumstance, ancestry and Fate, even as the poet takes pains to annotate the poem with identifying voice-markings along the poem’s textual margins or banks.
The Dart lying low in the darkness calls out Who is it?
trying to summon itself by speaking . . .
The poet hears the calling and feels called forth, summoned. Is it not she, the voice of the river “itself,” who loses herself in the poem’s speaking, and asks “whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx”? When “a walker” of the river replies to the Dart at the opening of the poem, his voice and the river’s and the poet’s are confluent, captured mimetically, and meta-poetically figured in “this long winding line of the Dart / their secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I / won’t let go of man [ . . . ]” As the primordial water won’t let of go of the human (sometimes drowning its human subjects), so the poet won’t release her attentive hold on water as she wrestles with and rides its protean energy, “a tattered shape in a perilous relationship with time” that also erodes, as we can hear, the grammatical ground of phrases, so that they float between functions.
Dart is a metamorphosis poem, and aligns with those poems in Oswald’s splendid anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet, “in which the human,” she writes, “has crossed over and disintegrated in the non-human.” A “transfiguring process”, “porousness or sorcery that brings living things unmediated into the text,” Oswald’s poetics at this point (2005) is a kind of translated orality, which she characterizes as “accretive rather than syntactic.” Jump fifteen years, and we find Oswald identifying this mode of writing with Homer’s grammar, which is “cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit [ . . . ] it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other” (7.8.20). --Lattimore, I think, among translators of Homer into English, builds this grammar better than others; his working of it in a hexameter-like line creates, to my ear, a sustained “Homeric” effect that I like hearing and makes me wish I knew Homer’s Greek; (Pound’s “Canto I”, a translation of Odysseus’ voyage to Hades, is the most musically thrilling with the strongest sensory feel; but we remember that it’s his invention out of a Renaissance Latin version).
Oswald finds in Homer an “escape from the solipsism that creeps into lyric poetry.” Homer embodies, she says, “a multiple mind; and they move out of the clouding and confinement of one person’s point of view [ . . . ] Things are allowed to be themselves in their radiance” (Tin House interview, 12.1.20). Allowing things to be themselves, not as perceived, but as they “radiate” independent of the human mind and its psychologies, must be fundamentally what it means to be human in proper relation to the world. Oswald is describing the epic, but is not writing one; in her allegiance, however, to the act of “looking out beyond the self”, in finding Homer an exemplar of “taking the imagination seriously as an external and collaborative force” (Oxford lecture)—with history, with the non-human—Oswald discovers, as early as the millennial turn, her mode for an extensive and extending lyric that reaches far past Romantic meditation and into an atavism of the ancient world. This is surely what suggests her as a neo-modernist, right down to the parataxis that governs the imagination working its way through epic—Dart (2002), Memorial (2011), Nobody (2019).
Parataxis, a syntax built out of adjacent independent clauses, in Dart can sound like a blurring of edges as words and phrases smoosh and jump, as in this excerpt, in which subordinated grammar gives way to clausal stacking:
( [ . . . ]
Bert White, John Coaker,
Frank Hellier, Frank Rensfield,
William Withycombe, Alex Shawe, John Dawe, William Friend,
their strength dismantled and holding only names
Two Bridges, Dunnabridge, Hexworthy)
Dartmeet—a mob of waters
where East Dart smashes into West Dart
two wills gnarling and recoiling
and finally knuckling into balance
in that brawl of mudwaves
the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny
the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall
from Cut Hill through Wystman’s Wood
put your ear to it, you can hear water
cooped up in moss and moving
slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut
with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another
and the West Dart speaks roots in a pinch of clitters
the East Dart speaks coppice and standards
the East Dart speaks the Gawler Brook and the Wallabrook
the West Dart speaks the Blackabrook that runs the prison
at loggerheads, lying next to one another on the riverbed
wrangling away into this valley of oaks
forester
and here I am coop-felling in the valley, felling small sections to give
the forest some structure. When the chainsaw cuts out the place
starts up again. It’s Spring, you can work in a wood and feel the earth
turning
waternymph
woodman working on your own
knocking the long shadows down
and all day the river’s eyes
peep and pry among the trees
when the lithe water turns
and its tongue flatters the ferns
do you speak this kind of sound:
whirlpool whisking round?
Listen I can slap and slide
my hollow hands along my side.
Imagine the bare feel of water,
woodman, to the wrinkled timber
When nesting starts I move out. Leaving the thicket places for the birds. Redstart, Pied Flycatchers. Or if I’m thinking, say every twelve trees I’ll orange-tape what I want to keep. I’ll find a fine one, a maiden oak, well-formed with a good crop of acorns and knock down the trees around it. And that tree’ll stand getting slowly thicker and taller, taking care of its surroundings, full of birds and moss and cavities where bats’ll roost and fly out when you work into dusk
Modes shift from name-listing the local dead to modifying phrases and clauses colored by river actions articulating a “regional speech” of waters and trees. When the “forester” voice comes in, the poem shifts to paratactic prose and then again to the song of a “waternymph” captured in ballad quatrains, then back into the prose of the forester. As in the giant modernist epics, such as Paterson (“about” a man, a place, and a river) parataxis governs structures larger than the sentence: the whole modality of the poem is one of collage, language blocks placed side by side that paradoxically create a streaming effect--something like the way, as you drive along the interstate, one voice on the radio overlays and then takes over another voice, your acceleration through space moving you through different zones of broadcast sound: in Dart, this includes imported block quotations that Oswald then shapes, such as the richly suggestive paragraph lifted from “Theodore Schwenke”, who founded the “Institute of Flow” and wrote Sensitive Chaos (1962), a study of “the creation of flowing forms in water and air”:
‘whenever currents of water meet the confluence is
where rhythmical and spiralling movements may arise,
spiralling surfaces which glide past one another in
manifold winding and curving forms
new water keeps flowing through each single strand of water
whole surfaces interweaving spatially and flowing past each other
in surface tension, through which water strives to attain
a spherical drop-form’
“Where rhythmical and spiralling movements may arise . . .” Is he describing the actions of water or poetry? In Dart that surface tension of interweaving strands includes musical sequences of phonemic interactions that strike little flurries of internal rhymes and other acoustic rubbing and knocking, as you can hear in this passage from the testimony of a “tin-extractor”:
Glico of the Running Streams named varieties of water
and Spio of the Boulders-Enclaved-In-The-River’s-Edges
and all other named varieties of Water
such as Loops and Swirls in their specific dialects
clucking and clapping
Cymene and Semaia, sweeping a plectrum along the stones
and the stone’s hallows hooting back at them
off-beat, as if luck could play the flute
can you hear them all,
muted and plucked,
muttering something that can only be expressed as
hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your
listening?
Oswald’s liquid muttering here is determinedly not the soft inland murmuring of Wordsworth’s nursing Severn, with its intimations and reassurances, but rather the “harsh primary /repetitive murmurs,” a “many-headed turbulence / among these meditations, this nimbus of words kept in motion,” “a constant irregular pattern” in which “you can feel the whole earth tipping, the hills shifting up and down, shedding stones as if everything’s a kind of water [ . . . ]” The dictions of science and industry, the language of labor, the registers that constitute Oswald’s “foundry for sounds // this jabber of pidgin-river / drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales / will you translate for me blunt blink glint”—these flinty sounds cut through the pastoralism and dreamy streams that meander in and out of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, to surge and plummet with the kind of verbal force we are more likely to hear in Goethe’s unruly waterworks.
If my points of historical reference jump between contemporary, high Modern, Romantic, and ancient Classical, it’s to suggest Oswald’s timelessness, even as her involvement in the trope of currents keeps her in constant explicit relation to time as coursing phenomenon and experience. Like the best poetry of the moment, Oswald’s Dart is the work of an individual imagination grounded in historical conditions—conditions of existence that include conditions for making poems—that also resists fashion. For all the pseudo-philosophical post-Nietzschean attacks over the last 45 years on the idea of self as a manifestation of a bourgeois individualism born of late capitalism; for all the effort and good intention of reasserting the value of poetry as community-based social practice and collective expression; in fact, in the poetry world today—from readings to podcasts to the virtual glad-handing and humble-bragging on social media—the performance of self has never been more virulently on display.
As is often the case, one thing begets its opposite; illness calls forth cure. Perhaps we find that twinning snake on the caduceus of Hermes in the concomitant work of poetic translation, which is also an expression of migrating people who carry language and culture with them into new lands where they are compelled also to adopt and adapt. (Adaptation as a form of translation is at the conceptual heart of Oswald’s practice, as she seeks collaboration with artists, musicians, and other performers, her most recent poem, Nobody being the thickest instance—first as a collaboration with the painter, William Tyler, in an artist’s book from 21 Publishing, then as a musical performance with Joanna MacGregor: the program of this performance is available from Oswald’s ephemera publishing venture, The Letter Press, and lays out a proposed musical structure in relation to the poem’s text and the rising and falling movement of a wave captured in a sequence of aerial photographs).
The practice of poetic translation requires both self-projection and self-sublimation, akin to that quality of integration of water joining water that Oswald figures in her “Sea Sonnet.” This “disappearing” act of self-dissolution makes up one level or aspect of the carrying over of translation. In Dart, we encounter the imaginative translation of the river into human speech, just as the Umwelt of the river creates the particular region of speech we identify with Devon and its people who work along the banks of the Dart. This perception of inter-being colors the experience of mutability that life along ever-fluctuating waterways tends to stage at accelerated rates (particularly in regard to erosion, which Oswald understands as a natural event that also takes place in language and can be located in the field of the poem).
At low water
I swim a dog-leg bend into a cliff
[ . . . ]
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace it.
[ . . . ]
who’s this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy,
all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave . . .
As the poem reaches its head in this culminating declaration, we find the answer to the poet’s initial riddle—“whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx”—is the name of the river god who embodies the dynamic force of changing form, Oswald’s persona in Dart, through whose mask she speaks, as he speaks through the polyphony of voices that belong to the river, and from which the poet makes her poem. She is never not there, the actor on stage, lowering and raising her mask in a variety of schemata, or forms, as she adopts different roles, different voices. In this sense, the poet is Proteus, a figure of poetic imagination, which we could also call “Slip-Shape,” shepherd of those “many selves” that slip like seals through the element of identity and form, a submersion of the psychologized individual into a protean collective, radically imagined and drawing on deep source-pools of ancient science, called poetry. To say, “This is Proteus,” is to unname oneself, to become in a sense nobody, and to stream, as her poem enacts in each measure, along the verbal riverbanks out to the sea of poetry, out to the origin source where Oswald has discovered her most recent long poem, Nobody, “a hymn to the sea” (the subtitle that’s stuck on the Norton edition in the U.S.).
The form of a river is relatively well-defined by its banks, cut by the streaming water; its form is its action. “It was lovely to be able to write a story about a river when I wrote Dart,” Oswald says, “because that has such a clear beginning, middle, and ending; so the poem was already structured for me. The great challenge for me was writing about the sea, which I tried to do in my book, Nobody. And I suppose for me the sea is that which you can’t write about, so that was like trying to jump into something impossible” (Q&A, 7.8.20).
Commissioned to accompany the watercolors of William Tyler, which capture with full-bodied abstraction the sense of the sea’s surface and depth as a single plane of involving, enfolding circulation, Oswald’s poem needed a conceit. She found it in a few lines of The Odyssey—enigmatic lines most readers pass over quickly, “a matchbox story embedded in The Odyssey,” Oswald calls them—about the nameless poet tasked by Agamemnon to watch his wife when he goes to Troy, who is then abducted by Aegisthus and abandoned on a deserted island, to perish there, out of the way, as Aegisthus seduces Clytemnestra. Oswald’s poem is thus staged as a kind of expansive lost margin occupied by one of the anonymous voices of Homer’s poem that we never get to hear, who sings his song to no one, being himself nobody, situated nowhere (no less than Homer, themselves). There is, of course, more than one nobody in The Odyssey, the most famous being the hero, who first names himself Nobody as a riddling tactic against the Cyclops, Polyphemus, and who then finds himself to be a nobody on the shores of Scheria, land of the Phaiakians, a stranger who remains unknown and unknowable until he tells his story of being lost in a watery infinity, “sitting alone on his raft,” writes Oswald, “in the middle of death.”
The sea in its dark psychosis dreams of your death
[ . . . ] the place is formless and unstable
[ . . . ]
a thickness with many folds in it [ . . . ]
which in its patience wears away the hard things
[ . . . ]
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
The not-Homer-not-Odysseus Nobody, one of the nameless poets figured in The Odyssey, is not an epic poet of a totalizing poem, but a lost rhapsode stitching together epic scraps of story as they float by his lonely shoreline, to create “this measureless mosaic,” an extended lyric of grieving. His voice, like the voice of Dart, is polyphonic, multiple, but powered by myth (not history), which locates the end of the universe in its beginnings, a figure of void that Oswald identifies in water’s infinite body of the sea. Unlike Dart’s flowing and branching, the verse movement of Nobody is gathered into strophic swells that tell fragmented elided stories—from the Oresteia (that Oswald sees as a reverse image of marriage in The Odyssey), Icarus, Philoctetes, Orpheus, and others, which intermix or swirl around narrative flotsam of the epic, and incorporate Oswald’s lyric voice as well.
Image after image it never ends
it has the texture of plough but with no harvest
but every so often a flower of light floats past
and one of them slept with her which is a woman’s weakness
we must keep it she said hidden under eyelids
put lampshades on this eagerness if we meet
at the fountain for example washing our clothes or drinking
but after a while he grew bored of this patience
he came to her door with necklaces
she had a needle in her hand she looked up sharp
and her mind slipped like snow off a leaf
but the gods know everything they sent a virus
fluttering after the ship and seven days later
she dropped like a dead bird into the bilge
four sailors had to swing her over the side and the water
with all its claws and eaters closed over her
the splash became a series of dots and
under that sound the green sea turned
grey
Ellipsis, the “series of dots,” is a kind of synecdoche for the poem which gestures, prismatically, towards a totality it can only evoke, never represent.
Who is it saying these things is it only the tide
passing like a rumour over the sea-floor or
who is it keeps silent
when somebody’s ring on nobody’s hand
sinks like an eye into darkness
and the wind drops
and the water roars itself speechless
who is it speaking she said
my friend
who is it watching me behind your eyelids
Oswald values Homer, in part, for the epic poet’s objectivity—“not every breath is a self,” she writes; the sea, if it is an element reflecting human consciousness, is not a singular subjectivity. “Liquidity is a principle of language,” writes Gaston Bachelard; “of all the elements, water is the most faithful ‘mirror of voices’ [ . . . ] a vast unity of discordant voices” (Water and Dreams, 1942). The poem’s ultimate ambition may be to find a language and a form for a subjectivity without ownership, untitled, “where the mind,” writes Oswald, “no longer belongs to the mind.”
“What I love about water,” Oswald says, “is that it’s evidently not human, nor is it animal nor even vegetable, but it does have an intelligence. It reflects you back and it seems to have a voice [ . . . ] and sometimes throws you into formlessness” (Tin House interview). As I’m writing this (July 2021), astonishing floods in Germany and Belgium have been overtaken by even greater flooding in China, and London is getting pelted hard, too, while the western regions of the U.S. and over a million hectares of Siberia are on fire. “The German language,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel, “can barely describe the devastation.” “I have not really wanted to make poems,” says Oswald, “that prioritize my human meaning above the meanings [of the natural world] that are going on around me.” (Tin House interview). As we collaborate around the world in raising the earth’s temperature, our creation of an Überwasser brings home the sublime terror of too much nature: what possible forms of poetry can any of us invent that could possibly matter? The question presses on all of us, but as a poet of water, Oswald may feel the pressure even more. The human voices that wake us as we drown have been telling us now for decades to open our eyes and prioritize a meaning larger than the human, but we’ve been caught in a tautology that served our solipsism (larger than human meanings can only be conveyed in forms of human meaning). If Oswald can become a poet whose voice continues to grow as a conduit to the world, not just our human existence, I’ll continue to tune in and hope it’s not too late. The poet of water, who was a poet of place, must now find a formal mode of rendering on an even greater scale, comprehensive and non-local, past a landscape of eroded language and story—one of global catastrophe and ecological collapse; but where to stand? The real adventure of Spacecraft Voyager I happens on Earth, the planet of Poseidon, Earth-shaker, where making vessels out of language, our common store consciousness, is an animal activity within an integrated biosphere of infinite mutual dependence.
“There is a confrontation,” says Oswald, in an Oxford lecture, “an erosion or reflection or opening of the mind which communicates the ‘standard practice’ of the natural world. John Clare put it well when he said, ‘I found the poems in the fields and only wrote them down.’ To find poems in fields is to push down on the other side of redress. It is to connect the human imagination with the sound of the surroundings, so that poems can take on weight and pick up speed and finally overtake their human thought-forms” (“On Behalf of a Pebble,” 3.4.21). I don’t know if the technology called poetry can do more than this overtaking, or anything more important. When I think into a habitable future, I have to wonder about the role poetry will play, if it plays any significant role, in continuing to broadcast the seeds of our sustenance, let alone the sounds.
Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry and the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn. His translation of Nelly Sachs’s Flight & Metamorphosis will be published by Farrar Straus Giroux in March 2022. He lives in Washington D.C.