Welcome to Litsy!

This is a book-length poem � a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey � about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters � Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes � who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water � fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald�s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid. one person has the character of dust another has an arrow for a soul but their stories all end somewhere in the sea (less)

This is a book-length poem � a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey � about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There (…more)