Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea

by Alice Oswald

Book Overview

A collage of water stories from the Odyssey , reconstructed as a mesmeric and hallucinatory book-length poem by acclaimed poet Alice Oswald. In Memorial , her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad , Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody , she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey--a poet abandoned on a stony island--and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. As with all of Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular, and liquid. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water--fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1324021780
• ISBN13: 9781324021780
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.0" x 9.6"