Alice Oswald’s Natural Terrors

The English poet Alice Oswald’s scavenged version of the Iliad, “Memorial,” appeared in the U.S. in 2012. Its method was radical: Oswald did away with Homer’s famous heroes and battles and speeches, providing instead an “oral cemetery” for the war’s minor players, those with tongue-twister names like Iphidamas and Periphetos. These noble souls were often glimpsed in strobe-lit flashes of gore at the moment of their deaths, their faces “pierced like a piece of fruit” or turned into carrion, “bird’s feathers on your face / . . . eating your eyes your open eyes.” The effect was chilling: an onslaught of names and traits that suggested modern atrocities and the capsule obituaries (a blurry head shot, a couple of sentences) that follow. But it was all, also, a little slapstick, as one after another shooting-gallery Greek popped up after aeons of obscurity, only to die a second time, walloped by Oswald’s powerful style. I thought of Edward Gorey’s deadpan alphabet books, visiting upon his innocent, tall-collared children the bloodiest freak accidents; and of the great Jackie Chan, mowing down scores of eager antagonists like a weaponized Gene Kelly. Oswald’s imagination was simultaneously empathic and lethal: she immolated instantaneously whatever she dreamed up.