Event Highlights: European Voices – A Reading and Conversation with British Poet Alice Oswald
On Thursday, February 20, 2014, the Center for the Study of Europe, in collaboration with the BU Poetry Series and the literary journal AGNI, hosted British poet Alice Oswald. The “meditative, musical, propulsive, mystical, atmospheric, bioregional, projective, deceptively casual, responsive, rhetorically confident, protoecopoetic, sonic, topographic, unsentimental, multifocal” poet was introduced by the poet Mary Pinard, Professor of English at Babson University.
Alice Oswald won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002 for her second collection of poetry, Dart. The poem traces the River Dart along its length, through the voices of its people – including its animal, drowned, and historical denizens. Dart also features myriad voices from nature and the “spirit” world of folklore, and in the foreword, the poet writes, “All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.“
Oswald’s third collection, Woods etc, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006, and in 2009 she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Sleepwalk On The Severn, a poem for several voices set at night on the Severn Estuary.”
At BU, Oswald read a selection of short poems from Dart and other works and concluded with a longer reading from her latest work, Memorial, which she describes as an “excavation of the Illiad,” a poem that she says happens in “layers and layers and layers.”
