I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate. — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem.… — 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… — 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.… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you… — 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… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm… — Alice Oswald Copy Share Image
If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I stood looking down through the beech trees. When I threw a stone I could count to five before the splash. Then I jumped… — Alice Oswald Copy Share
Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes,… — Alice Oswald Copy Share
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… — Alice Oswald Copy Share
