“Like the high unescapable eye / Of the eagle / Under whose beam / The shadow-swift hare can‘t hide / Pressed flat to the floor / Of a leafy wood / The loitering eye looks once / And kills” (Oswald 18). Chilling
I know it was a good month when I try to choose favourites and I see that I've given 5 stars to 9 out of 25 of them. #booknerdproblems 😊
Like hawkwings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws
Like tribes of summer bees
Coming up from the underworld out of a crack in a rock
A billion factory women flying to their flower work
Being born and reborn and shimmering over fields
Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves
Like bird families feeding by a river
Hundreds of geese and herons and long-necked swans
When an ember of eagle a red hot coal of hunger
Falls out of the sky and bursts into wings
Like thick flocks of falling snow
In winter when god showers his arrows at us
Pouring them down putting the winds to sleep
Until the hills the headlands the grassy lowlands
All the ploughs and crops of the earth every living twig
Is wiped out white with snow it goes on and on
That's how blank it is when the world succumbs to snow
Even AMPHIMACHOS died and he was a rarity
A green-eyed changeable man from Elis
He was related to Poseidon
You would think the sea could do something
But it just lifted and flattened lifted and flattened
Like a stone
Stands by a grave and says nothing
Like the shine of a sea swell
Lifting and flattening silently
When water makes way for the wind
And dreams of its storms
Huge waves hang in a hush
Uncertain which way to fall
Until a breeze breaks them
And now the arrow flies through GORGYTHION
Somebody's darling son
As if it was June
A poppy being hammered in the rain
Sinks its head down
It's like that
When a man's neck gives in
And the bronze calyx of his helmet
Sinks his head down
pickBrief elegies for each of the hundreds who died in the Trojan war. Gorgeous nature and family imagery together with violence. I read with dismay and sadness, yet also found Oswald's words are a balm. Homer's soldiers could be men dying in wars today. Let us respect our mortality. This book filled me with awe.
Poor ARCHEPTOLEMOS
Someone was there
And the next moment no one.
Like fire with its loose hair flying rushes through a city
The look of unmasked light shocks everything to rubble
And flames howl through the gaps
My runner up for Best book by a living writer
Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad | 
