Falling Awake & Other Poems

Labyrinth is honored to welcome Alice Oswald during her residency at Princeton University, sponsored by the Department of Classics. Her most recent book, Falling Awake, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize. She has also been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Oswald was trained as a classicist. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, received a Forward Poetry Prize. Oswald often works in book-length projects and is known for her interests in gardening, ecology, and music. Her other collections of poetry include Dart, Woods, etc., Weeds and Wild Flowers, A Sleepwalk on the Severn, and Memorial, which won the 2013 Warwick prize for writing.

Alice Oswald’s acclaimed volume Memorial portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald re-imagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.