essay
Etc. of the Woods: Alice Oswald’s Trees
As dawn rises in the poem “Tithonus”, the reader is confronted by a two-page spread which, apart from the empty metronomic dots recording the first 46 minutes of a new day, there is only one abbreviated phrase: “Etc.”(Falling Awake, 62-3) In Alice Oswald’s third collection Woods etc. that sign for “and the rest” crops up for another w-word: “Rutty road. Winter etc.” (“Five Fables of a Length of Flesh,” 32). Oswald is recorded as saying in her interview with Kate Kellaway: “I love etc. and dot dot dot. I feel the universe is constructed with an etc” (2005). What are the particular etc. of the woods? What is it trees are so miscellaneously but so specifically among? Oswald writes just as much about stones and stars, waters and the moon as trees, but these other topics are not in themselves the etc. around trees. There is something untidily or restlessly implicated in woods uniquely, an encumbering or litter just out of focus perhaps but indissociable. The etc. may also refer to the assorted impossibilities and necessities of writing towards a wood, or within Oswald’s defiant personificatory voices, as a (compromised) wood or tree. As Claire Amitstead in her Guardian interview reports: for Oswald, just as a tree can be a nymph, a poet can be a rotten swan. Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible (2016).
In this essay, I assay four collections, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Dart, Woods etc. and Falling Awake. I shall read across some of the poems found there, assembling a receptive collage of tree and leaf quotations detached from their immediate contexts within a particular poem (so one etc. less) but never shorn of their distinctiveness. As such they suggest fresh coalescences, interlacings or contrasts amongst themselves, momentary isolations of emphasis but never insulated from Oswald’s broadest ecological and ontological horizons.
Trees are the universals of their own domain, as much sounds as appearances, never quite out of range if out of sight: “now the sound of the trees is worldwide” (“Marginalia at the Edge of Evening”, Woods etc.,27). They are also actively expansive, however reticent and, in our current damaged ecologies, mostly non-invasive: “put your ear to the river you hear trees / put your ear to the trees you hear the widening” (“River”, Woods etc., 41). If the waters themselves get broader, it is because they are navigating a shoreline of trees.
and immediately, I was in the woods again,
poised, seeing my eyes seen,
hearing my listening heard
under the huge tree improvised by fear (“Owl”, Woods etc., 6)
To be so instantly immersed in woods is equally an intervention of dread, given the eerie counterbalances of inner and outer in the woodland midst. Alert listening (with its implied physical stasis as possibly an alien presence) is being registered not just by animals and birds but through the fabric of the trees themselves. Seeing eyes are also tactile eyeballs, able to be touched by twigs and stems, and in that way enact what Merleau-Ponty in his The Visible and the Invisible recognised as the “flesh of the world,” an active inter-leaving of distinct domains (248).
Trees know sumptuous overflowings: “when the tree begins to flower / like a glimpse of // Flesh (“You Must Never Sleep under a Magnolia”, Falling Awake, 38), but they also have long latent intervals, “(the quiet woods creaking after rain)” (“Poem”, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, 9; hereafter: The Thing) or become depleted: “with the trees exhausted / tapping at the sky” (“Slowed-Down Blackbird”, Falling Awake, 29). Reinvigoration can be costly: “One thing flexes its tail causing widespread devastation, / it takes hold of the trees, it blows their failings out of them” (“Head of a Dandelion”, Woods etc., 22). Induration and long-term damage easily supervene: “Old scrap-iron foxgloves / rusty rods of the broken woods” (“Evening Poem”, Falling Awake, 42). Abrupt arrival within the acoustic arena of vibrant woodland can mutate to something more damaging: “I remember walking once into increasing / woods, my hearing like a widening wound” (“Woods etc.”, Woods etc.,7). Here, the hearing is no longer purely subjective as the “widening” of the wound is instigated in some mysterious way by the “increasing” of the woods which penetrates a personal self as a deeper interior creasing, marking, witnessing.
The poem “Owl” quoted earlier where the speaker finds herself “in the woods again” occurs “at the joint of dawn” and the presence of the woods “miles away” is communicated by the “owl’s call” opening the darkness. (“Owl”, 6). Such a junction of night and day is overdetermined once projected onto timber joints, and in another poem light and dark may not be so much a feature of time as sheer density: “a greenwood through a blackwood / passes (like the moon’s halves / meet and go behind themselves)” (“A Wood Coming into Leaf”, The Thing,10). Light (as moonlight) is still implicated here, but the green keys into its own darkness as the realm of woodland (fire-damaged?) intensifies and withdraws into itself: “the hush of things / unseen inside, the heartbeat of dead wood” (“Leaf”, Woods etc., 8). It is here the “wound” of the woods can mutate to a different order of intervention, both invasion and healing: in Dart the forester says “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” (55). The chainsaw “cuts out” in two senses, bringing silence and fresh light but savaging tree-limbs as it does. In “Tithonus” the “one rook” is “too black” as it goes into “smoky trees” but the blackwood implied here though “saying nothing” is not fire-scorch but touched by a mist, “the wood still lost in its inmost /unable”. What is it the wood is unable to do, while continuing to say nothing, rendering “unable” more like a proto-predicate, an interior dis-orientation or withdrawal? “Unable” has a line to itself, so there is both gap and pause before the next two lines: “and mist forms an orderly queue / for the horizon” (“Tithonus”, Falling Awake, [51]). Not rows of plantation trees but the mist enwrapping them senses a further distance, something that can be waited on.
In her poem “Wood Not Yet Out” Oswald conceives of distance not just apportioned between trees but as more of a mutual inclining, an intimate filtering of near and far: “sections of distance tilted through the trees”. This in itself is a mode of bordering:
The wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been (Woods etc., 9)
The difference a wood makes, what it makes emanate, can also feel glutinous, retentive, even disturbing: “A lime-green light troubles the river-bed / as if the mud was haunted by the wood” (“Severed Head Floating Downriver”, Falling Awake, 10). Might the trees step into the river itself, or even wade across with a: “semi-resilient softness whose flatness is a floor for the barefoot steps of branches” (“Psalm to Sing in a Canoe”, Woods etc., 40)? How the woods impinge or disturb is no less a factor of their leaf-refracted light: “In the invisible places / Where the first leaves start // Like through each leaf light is being somehow / Put together in a rush and wedged in a narrow place” (“Ideogram for Green”, Woods etc.,26). The play on impulse and rushlight creates a distinctive tree-texture weaving and wedging into formations whose internal pressures form distinct margins for the way any landscape can be perceived and entered. That sense of onset amid this interweaving will return in (“A Rushed Account of the Dew”, Falling Awake, 13): “find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown”. Any such fastening is purely tensional and rather than domesticate or arborize the unknown (though it does localise it), there is a sense of being carried along within unknown domains. What difference do trees here make?
Oswald’s poems don’t record or illustrate events external or internal simply in terms of their initial moments of perception. Rather, whatever might be happening in a poem is fully exposed to the entire gamut of ontological becoming or reversal, together with its intimate dangers and demands. What might well come out of anywhere or nowhere is likely to be less than any sustainable object or be on the threshold of dissolving its own substance “Like a bent-down bough of nothing” (“Hymns to Iris”, Words etc.,39). As “Seabird’s Blessing” (Woods etc., 4) intones:
Pray for us this weird
bare place – we are screaming
O sky count us not as nothing
Typically for Oswald, this is not a human voice, but a desolate prayer resonating throughout creation faced with these sky-deserts, a voice beyond the seabird milieu of its immediate projection. The weirdness of the bare sky seems bewitched by the cries which cascade through it. Another voice will adopt a mode of moonspeak: “But you and I, who know each other’s nothingness, / are lonely, like the blues beyond” (“The Moon Addresses Her Reflection”, The Thing, 18). Here, the stubborn sense of an ontological deficit collapses reflexive difference onto the “blues beyond” – once more a desert-like sky but tinged with something more expressive, the elegiac lyric voice. “The Seabird’s Blessing” will reiterate the distinctive “as” of nothing, so as to bespeak the ontological hollow or recess of a “nothing-as”: “O sky count us not as nothing / O sea count us not as nothing”. If the isolated voice is nothing, what is it to speak out as nothing? Is this a nothing seeking one thing distinctively less (and so resolutely singular) than absolute void? This “as nothing” seems detectable within the prayer-space of “And here I work in the hollow of God’s hand / with Time bent round into my reach”, (“Prayer”, The Thing, 40). Merleau-Ponty writes of the soul as the hollow of the body and the body as the distension of the soul (233). More often in Oswald’s work, however, time seems to bend out of reach, though its retreat leaves a recessive trace witnessed to as such even as it dissipates immediate experience. Here, though, something like a minimal sense of incarnation can be inscribed:
and you can see,
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh
is not a soul, is small and creaturish
No experienced contemplative would ever have thought anything different, so what is affirmed here is a creature amid creatures, someone who to that extent hears and shares a common voice between exchangeable vocalities.
Joanne Dixon sees epiphany as decidedly present in Oswald’s poetry “which can be read as ongoing process” but which fluctuates between “certainty and uncertainty, delaying, or ultimately denying, a teleological reading” (8). Dixon posits ultimate denial as an alternative to delay but this could well be a critical over-reading. Within the textures of the poetry itself delay more directly figures as a projective pause or act of patience, an essential part of the “slow performance” of a “leaf uncurling” which Oswald mentions in her interview with Max Porter (2014). This is a patience which loosens any mechanism of the teleological to open up the numinous horizon it gestures towards and will not bypass prematurely. Jack Thacker emphasises Oswald’s feeling for the “significance of silent matter” between words (in her readings of Homer), as this is a silence able to inflect the way the materials of perception can be internalised (106). And Merleau-Ponty in his Signs argues that meaning is not a formal definition but the more mysterious allusive space between words which is ultimately a silence (42-3). My earlier quotation likening a rainbow to “a bent-down bough of nothing” continues with “A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air” (“Hymn to Iris”, Woods etc., 39). The thinness of air doesn’t inhibit its tenacious linking. Robert Baker writes: “This is the mystery of so many bridges in our world: they are nothing, nothing but intimations and affinities, yet they are everything, forming the reaches of our lives” (107). This hints at how a nothing functions as a nothing-as rising and arcing, or as another more provocative line of Oswald puts it: “and arcs as in the interim of a resurrection” (“The Melon Grower”, The Thing, 38). “Resurrection” here witnesses to the unconditional and unrepeatable, suspended, but once glimpsed, embedded, within the paradoxical conditions of an infinite finitude: as such an inexhaustible source of desire, for an infinity for the finite, not just yet another amalgam of finitude.
The world is “wedged / between its premise and its conclusion” (“Field”, Woods etc., 25): such is the sheer ungainly thickening of domains making up a world, unable to escape these primordial lineaments however incompletely they can be internalised. “Premise” nonetheless echoes “promise” and “conclusion” is haunted by “inclusion” in my reading of this poetry, or as “Ideogram for Green” has it (Woods etc., 26): “In the invisible places / Where the first leaves start”. The mutual echoing of premise and promise resembles the face-off between moon and moon in “I Bicycled Past a Ship” (The Thing, 23): “one inarticulate the other dumb, / each on edge and staring round / in the same holy vacuum” Here hollowness is even more itself within holiness, and any vacuum in the midst of ontological possibility is no longer straight-forwardly vacuous. Is something of the negative pressure of vacuum being held apart here or respaced, so that whatever is expressible and imaginable comes to be infilled by persistently offered commonalities and relationships? Or does it more basically offer that very gesture? Tristram Woolf affirms there is a “relationship felt by the mind that receives what it also gives. There is both a meagreness and a magnitude to this kind of intimacy: it is…both no more and no less, than a pressing feeling of closeness which the poet chooses to pursue” (59). Oswald remains a stubbornly lyrical particularist, but also senses the nothings prone to supervene on momentary details always in passage; her lyrical assiduity doesn’t simply register such conditions but simultaneously reoffers their entire terms and dependencies: at each moment they are broadcast and recast from the momentary.
Tree limbs can display either a lapidary intricacy: “went among tree boughs like the dark detail of marble” (“When a Stone Was Wrecking His Country”, The Thing, 33), or an airy filigree-like tensionality: “Think of the ten quiet trees with their nerves in the air” (“The Apple Shed”, The Thing, 37). Where there is tautness there can also be a dim prescience:
which builds up, which becomes a pressure,
a gradual fleshing out of a longing for light,
a small hand unfolding, feeling about.
into that hand the entire
object of the self being coldly placed,
the provisional, the inexplicable I
in mid-air, meeting the air and dancing (“Leaf”, Woods etc., 8)
The “cold placing of the self” which the child-leaf senses despite its flesh already embodying a “longing for light” seems here not so much more than “the horizon making only muffled / answers but moisture on leaves is / quick to throw glances / … is it light is it light” (“Tithonus”, Falling Awake, 46). Here the woods have darkened again, they are “bodiless” and in “black lace”, a sombre disembodying with erotic undertones, though laces are forms of intertwining as well as lanceolate glances at an inexplicable, inextricable horizon. At the least, within “Leaf” it is a “provisional” setting, in its own strange way life has already provided for the emergent leaf, whose groping insufficiency appears as life’s authentic measure, though still not definitive as such.
Joanne Dixon finds in the poems in Woods etc. “epiphanies of brightness and unfixity” which present “epiphany as an ongoing process of unconcealment and suspension, rather than a singular moment of revelation” (18). She sees this as entirely “non-teleological” but perhaps reckons without the “etc.” of trees themselves, their complicit standing before and searching from, their horizonal intimacies which once assayed in poetry enact and position intimations. They are intimations of the “etc.”, so to that degree still inexact. Mary Pinard highlights the acoustic dimension of Oswald’s work, as “shaped by sound and summons, portal and encounter” (26). As Robert Baker sums up the point, opening the doors of perception in this way discovers “we are more than what we are. Life itself invites us to a wider life. Mimesis is a crossing” (106). One way to extend this insight is to claim that the poems simply don’t know how to be ontologically inert, despite their overt reservations and lack of self-grounding. As Dixon further affirms, this poetry directs us towards the “unreachable and unknowable within the realm of quotidian human experience” (18) Here, I would add, Oswald’s “etc.” are distinctly overdetermined: they are the everything else drawn along in the train of the poet’s perceptions and encounters but add their own peculiar weighting in inverse proportion to their sheer miscellaneity. For William Desmond in his God and the Between, this reveals there is something “surd” about general existence which is not self-explanatory: the “other-being” of the natural world is not accessible to our own categories of thinking, but which makes us ask: what makes possible the possibility of these things, this way of being (22-3)? And Baker recalls how for Gabriel Marcel the mystery of existence can never be reduced to the dimensions of a mere problem, so we have to live in a certain way which embraces this difference (117). Tristram Wolff outlines how Oswald’s inheritance of Romantic nature writing, both organic and inorganic, leads us “toward a closer attention to varieties of materialization” (637). This can extend towards “materialisms responsive enough to sense more deeply the conflicting moods of things as they are” (670). The “etc.” of the woods are those rough-hewn peripheral elements surrounding or abounding in trees, which either go between or lie immediately beyond a foreground, or just before a startlingly unfamiliar horizon:
the vertical stress of the sky
draw trees narrow…
whole trees with their bones (“Sisyphus”, Woods etc., 11-12)
Here it is sky-stress drawing trees through the structural tautness of themselves which both sharpens and incorporates them into their emergent wholes, bones to be drawn on:
The wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been (“Wood Not Yet Out”, Woods etc., 9)
What is it to “listen down”? Is it to listen less exactly or half-catch the undertones and sonic aftermath of the “cracking bushtwigs” of active walking once an edge of the wood is reached? This “listening down” becomes even more vocalised as significant pause in “Poem”: “my voice, a pollen dust, puffs out / the reason I remain” (The Thing, 9). Human breath is a fertile cloud of rapport with the “quiet woods” of the poem, dispersive but able to regather at any available querk or perch of resettlement. For the human being to remain in its own reason is to embrace a dust-cloud of intentionality re-coalescing around opportunity. Or, as another poem already looked at puts it: “and all trees, with their ears to the air, / seeking a steady state and singing it over till it settles” (“Birdsong for Two Voices”, Words etc., 5). The trees themselves appear to be “listening down” even as they project into the air. Their cereal-like ears may equally give vent to a cloud of pollen dust, to a dispersal offering novel modes of settlement.
Baker notes how Oswald’s preference is for poems which follow “the structure of oral poetry, which tends to be accretive rather than syntactic” (100). He traces in this “at root a pattern of call and response that we might enter by echoing and unfolding this pattern” (100). Here he is perhaps echoing the influential work of the French phenomenologist Jean Louis Chrétien in his The Call and the Response, for whom response can never grasp itself as adequate to a prior call, and as such only operates in a wounded condition, the sole indication it has that the call has been met with some sort of answer (6). Baker suggests a further affinity, sensing in Oswald “a pliant lyrical version of what the Christian tradition calls mystical kenosis. A certain emptying of the self is a part of a crossing into other regions of life” (106) The “etc.” circulating amid and across trees tends towards a chastened pre- or non-convergence but is never without its transformations. The web of preventions around anything like revelation here has a quasi-sacramental quality in that it always remains in position: where horizontal transfers (detours) can haunt vertical transformations of attention and absorption, with any contrast in directionality kept within a common tensionality shared out moment by moment.
As such, the associated etc-apparatus of trees is something of a participatory metonym for both the blind alleys and the moments of rootedness in Oswald’s poetics, a metonym trailing further metonyms for every aspect of how woods behave, withdraw or attract. To return to “Tithonus” finally:
willows I want to pause and praise
you who used to be headstrong and
have now forgiven everything (Falling Awake, [64])
Is there an implicit “I” between the “you” and the “who”, so that it is the old man himself who can now overcome his stubbornness and forgive? However, the “pause and praise” is an aspect of the “slow performance” (which Oswald confessed to Kate Kellaway is virtually addictive in her work (2005)), so that the presence of human regret or reconciliation fuses onto the voice of the tree itself. Now the human voice can only know itself through the tree’s own wilfulness and its “headstrong” (ie top-heavy and as yet unshorn) poll, from which more-than-human intervention comes the possibility of universal forgiveness, the everything yet remaining of the tree as encumbrance and envoy: “the green shell song trees etcetera” (“Psalm to Sing in a Canoe”, Woods etc., 40).
Works Cited
Armitstead, Claire, “Alice Oswald”, The Guardian, 22 July (2016).
Baker, Robert, “‘All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’: the Poetry of Alice Oswald”, Cambridge Quarterly 46.2 (2017), pp. 99-118.
Chrétien, Jean Louis. The Call and the Response. Fordham University Press, 2004.
Desmond, William. God and the Between. Blackwell, 2008.
Dixon, Joanne, “Brightness and Unfixity: Reframing Epiphany in Alice Oswald’s Woods etc.”, C21 Literature 7.1 (2019), pp. 1-21.
Kellaway, Kate, “Into the Woods”, The Observer, 19 June (2005).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
--- The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Oswald, Alice. Dart. Faber & Faber, 2002.
--- Falling Awake. Jonathan Cape, 2016.
--- The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. Faber & Faber, 2007
--- Woods etc. Faber & Faber, 2006.
Pinard, Mary, “Voices of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 10.2 (2009), pp. 17-32.
Porter, Max, “Interview with Alice Oswald,” The White Review 11 (2014) n.pag.
Wolff, Tristram, “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic,” ELH 84.3 (2017), pp. 617-47.
Peter Larkin contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (2011). Among his more recent poetry collections are Trees Before Abstinent Ground (Shearsman, 2019) and Encroach to Resume (Shearsman, 2021).