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Literature & Fiction

Regional & Cultural

British & Irish

Nobody

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Nobody

This is a book-length poem â€“ a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey â€“ about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters â€“ Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes â€“ who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.

Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water â€“ fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswaldâ€™s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.

one person has the character of dust

another has an arrow for a soul

but their stories all end

somewhere

in the sea
Country USA
Manufacturer Jonathan Cape
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781787331969
ReleaseDate 2019-09-05
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781787331969

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