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Alice Oswald Quotes

British - Poet | 1966 -

I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate.

Think You Place Spirits Accommodate

I hate not managing to speak clearly. I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia - like I'm locked in my own head - if what I've said hasn't reached someone.

Hate Speak Someone Feeling Said Own

There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.

Words People Stand Landscape Whole

There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem. I can't afford to relax in any area of life. You have to keep your senses awake to all the complacency that kicks in - particularly for the English.

Life Complacency Relax Writing You

I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.

Work Yourself Think You Human Slave

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 thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

Lips Place Grey More Hungry Pieces

It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop.

Start Hands You Earth Stop Way

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 of information system of the air.

Wind Cold Information Kind Movement

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, real light attending everything.

Light Poetry People Leaf You Alive

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.

Teacher Me Ignore Wonderful Just

Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.

Courage Men People Lose Farmers

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 established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.

Great Poetry Mind Me Roots Thinking

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