If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people,… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them. — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it. — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn't really anything. It's a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
I like Patti Smith's lyrics, and sometimes think I could be influenced by them. But she has a kind of cool that's beyond me. — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, youll see something of the difference between Homers poetry and anyone… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
A living tree is a changing, sleeve shape, a wet, thin, bright green creature that survives in the thin layer between heartwood and bark.… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
