Alice Oswald

“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...”

“One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief...”

“The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centr...”

“One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dang...”

“I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limb...”

“Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius...”

“If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this paus...”

“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.”

“At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different la...”

“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 m...”

“There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real worl...”

“I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.”

“A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a w...”

“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, retinas or rags; and they quickly f...”

“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,'...”

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

“I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.”

“It's a relief to hear the rain. It's the sound of billions of drops, all equal, all equally committed to falling, like a sudden outbreak of democracy. Water, when it hits the ground, instant...”

“At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.”

“Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.”