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A review by tumblyhome_caroline
Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald
5.0
This was both a brutal but also a breathtaking read. The language is slow, each page deserves to be read and reread and settled down with before moving on.
Often the images Oswald conjures are those that make me a reader.. it is the little things in life brought out of the commonplace and made to shine with a new light… and then changing forever how I see things.
In this book it is the wind and the sea, it is time, death, grief and an inescapability of fate, if fate is such a thing and the price the innocent pay, walking into what feels like their pre designed futures
Anyway, I loved this … I can’t show my favourite parts because somehow it would diminish the reading experience for others.. you have to fall upon this poem almost unawares.. but the short, almost flash fiction of Adrestus and Amphius was extremely striking, as was Hectors story.. it moved me more than his story does in the Iliad itself.
Often the images Oswald conjures are those that make me a reader.. it is the little things in life brought out of the commonplace and made to shine with a new light… and then changing forever how I see things.
In this book it is the wind and the sea, it is time, death, grief and an inescapability of fate, if fate is such a thing and the price the innocent pay, walking into what feels like their pre designed futures
Anyway, I loved this … I can’t show my favourite parts because somehow it would diminish the reading experience for others.. you have to fall upon this poem almost unawares.. but the short, almost flash fiction of Adrestus and Amphius was extremely striking, as was Hectors story.. it moved me more than his story does in the Iliad itself.