Woods, Weeds and Wildflowers: Nature Poetry

Alice Oswald’s poetry explores the relationship between people and the landscapes in which they live. She is interested in the oral tradition and believes poems need the energy of the voice of more than one person, as she puts it “the shattering or the splash of a variety of voices”. Her latest work ‘Nobody’ is a book length poem based on Homer’s epic story The Odyssey. The poem she says is an enquiry into the edgeless-ness of the sea – what Homer describes as an unfenced place - and what happens if you remove the fences around language and create something experimental, and as hard to define and grasp as the sea.

While Alice Oswald might be described as a poet of water Fiona Sampson could be said to be a poet of air. She is, she says, interested in breath, because without breath there is no language and without language no thought and certainly no poetic line. Most of the poems in her new book Come Down are one sentence poems, what she calls ‘one breath poems’ in which everything is connected to everything else in the poem, and they employ secret technique that the reader has to seek out for themselves.