Memorial: A Version of Homer's

Absolutely beautiful writing. Thought-provoking and emotion-stirring, so visual and beautiful metaphors.

Maybe that's the best way to read this book. The writer really needs to record an audiobook version though

I've read this a few times. The poems are so gentle, even though the poems are about death. Add this to your library!

Alice Oswald may be the most exciting poet to appear since the days of Pound and Eliot. I know that's a large claim, but I've been an avid reader of poetry for over 50 years and haven't heard a new voice of this force in all that time. I don't mean that she is the greatest poet writing, as there are great poets who use less rhetorical lines, writers such as W.S. Merwin, Gary Snider, Wendell Berry and Robert Bly. But Oswald has recaptured and re-invented the kind of large, world-shaking and world-shaping poetry that Pound and Eliot brought forth. It's amazing that her work, winning laurels in England, is so little known in the U.S. and I urge lovers of poetry to do something about that. Read her, and spread the word.

I heard the author reading the passage about the death of Hector in an audio exhibit at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and I was blown away. I immediately bought the book, and devoured it. It gets across the power, pain, and beauty of the Iliad in a tiny fraction of the space, and relates it profoundly to themes that we understand in the modern world. Half translation, half-reimagining, this is a powerful, lyric work.

A beautiful volume of elegantly spare poetry

Alice Oswald has written a fabulous "version" of the Iliad as interesting as Christopher Logue's reworkings. This long poem is a series of death scenes, some just one line long, followed by an apt simile, so that every human war death is illustrated by some natural occurence, often involving predatory birds or the ocean. Oswald's frame, an opening listing of names emulating war memorials and a closing series of twelve similes, is inspired. My review at poetsandwar.com goes into more detail, but anyone who enjoys Homer should find this distillation a remarkably moving work. Brilliant imagery.

I have read many transltions of the Iliad and taught selections from it at the university level, but this is something different. With the narrative stripped away and the deaths and similes foregrounded, the poem is much shorter and even starker than the original. Oswald explains the differences in how she treats the two aspects of her version, and there's a concluding essay by Eavan Boland that highlights the technique Oswald uses of repeating the simile sections. I will read this intense and moving version many more times than once.

This translation takes the heroes, fates, and deities our of the Iliad. All that's left are the humans who lost their lives. After all this time, people still die like they did thousands of years ago; for the same reasons.

I've never read anything like this before and I'm so happy that i decided to pick it up! Oswald is a great writer and has a way of humanizing the characters of Homer's Iliad through beautiful similes. I can't wait to read more from her!