Alice Oswald’s Memorial is one of my favorite poetry collections. Depending on whether you are looking at
the American or UK cover, it is either a “version” or an “excavation” of Homer’s Iliad, and the trick that Oswald so deftly pulls off is that she only translates the deaths, interspersed with some of the epic similes. Gone is all the plot, the rage of this man and the glory of that: she pulls all these characters together in the democracy of death. The book is marked by a terrible tenderness. I got to teach it last year and my students were particularly fascinated by Oswald’s haunting project.
So I was very excited to hear about Nobody, published in 2019, which sounded like “Memorial but with the Odyssey and the sea.” Oswald, in addition to being a poet (and current Oxford Professor of Poetry) is a trained classicist, so she’s got a strong background to do something interesting here. I ordered Nobody…at some unspecific point of Pandemic Standard Time (which is meaningless), and finally got round to reading it last week. And it isn’t quite a rendering of the Odyssey that focuses just on the sea. Indeed, the sea is critical, and it’s not surprising the plot of the Odyssey disappears, given how Oswald handled The Iliad, but what she is doing is less immediately clear.
Part of that is the issue of who the “nobody” of the title is. If you have a glancing familiarity with Greek myth, you probably recall that “Nobody” or “No-man” is what Odysseus calls himself in the encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops, and my initial assumption was that Oswald was playing off this, too. And, in part, she is–but the epigraph to the book reveals that “nobody” is also an unnamed minor character, a poet or bard whom Agamemnon tasked with keeping an eye on his wife Clytemnestra while he was off fighting in Troy, who the villainous Aegistheus then abandoned on a desert island so that he could seduce Clytemnestra.
Nor does the collection restrict itself to the stories in the Odyssey. About halfway through, Oswald relays the tale of Philomena, who was raped by her brother-in-law; he then cut out her tongue so she couldn’t accuse him, so she told the story through a weaving that she showed her sister, who then killed and cooked her own children and fed them to Tereus as vengeance. When he realized what had happened, he pursued the sisters, who the gods turned into a nightingale and a swallow. (Greeks, man!) It’s a peculiar moment because it is not in the Odyssey, and the implication is perhaps that the nobody-poet is telling this story, and Oswald herself is braiding together several strands of myth for her own purposes.
And it’s interesting and enjoyable, but it renders the project as a whole less focused than Memorial. The poetry is dreamlike, in ways, drifting from episode to episode without preamble or transition, something like the irregular regularity of waves of the sea. (The form/content link is quite clear throughout.) And some of those moments truly are lovely, for example:
How strange she says among those better worlds underwater
where the cold of swimming is no different from the clear of looking
there are people still going about their work
unfurling sails and loosening knots
it’s as if they didn’t know they were drowned
it’s as if I blinded by my own surface
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
Oswald has such a knack for this, the turn of phrase that tilts your world a little to the side for a moment. She also has a keen eye for the fragility of our little lives, as of course many classical authors did:
one person has the character of dust
another has an arrow for a soul
but their stories all endsomewhere
in the sea
These are the moments that arrest you, where you find yourself stopping on the page just to reread that perfect distillation of feeling and language. Oswald can be so very good at this, planting an image in your head that you come back to over and over because of its gemlike perfection. I cherished these moments when they appeared in Nobody, and wished there were more of them.
Part of the problem might be the fact that Nobody, unlike Memorial, isn’t actually a fully self-contained work. On the last page, there is a note telling us that the poems were commissioned to accompany the watercolors of William Tillyer, and it was first published as an art book with those paintings. There is perhaps something that is lost without those paintings to accompany the verse. It remains a deeply lovely work, but one that did not quite penetrate down to my core the way that Memorial did.
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