from Memorial

by Alice Oswald

The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried to darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything
Pyrasus Iton Pteleus Antron
He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half-built
His wife rushed out clawing her face
Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother
Took over command but that was long ago
He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years

Like a wind-murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land-ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn-stalks shake their green heads

Like a wind-murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land-ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn-stalks shake their green heads

An extract from the book-length excavation of the Iliad, by Homer (Faber). This book won the Popescu Prize 2013, judged by Karen Leeder and David Wheatley.

Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald was the inaugural winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2009 for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers. She lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her book-length poem Dart, originally commissioned by The Poetry Society, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc., won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006, and in 2009 she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for A Sleepwalk on the Severn, a night-piece for several voices set on the Severn Estuary. Memorial (Faber, 2012) was the winner of The Poetry Society's Popescu Prize in 2013, and was also awarded the 2013 Warwick Prize for writing. Tithonus, featured on BBC Radio 4's The Echo Chamber, was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award. She has worked on several commissions for The Poetry Society, including for Painting Paradise and National Poetry Day. In 2017 her collection Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape, 2016) won the Costa Poetry Award.