O: Alice Oswald

Body

My two living ‘O’ poets on the shelf were Alice Oswald and Sharon Olds – both quite different in lots of ways in terms of subject matter and style, but both of whom I’ve had a lot of love for at different points in my reading life. Olds is a towering figure in modern U.S. poetry, continuing the Confessional tradition into the second half of the 20^th and beginning of the 21^st Century. In some ways her style feels like it has more in common with her alphabet partner Frank O’Hara, in that there’s a very direct, intimate, conversational style in the language, often stripped back from showy poet-y type language. But ultimately I chose Alice Oswald, a much more ‘English’ poet in her relationship with form, with nature, with Romanticism. I loved her gouging translation of the Iliad, ‘Memorial’, which fragmented that poem and focused only on the short and momentary descriptions of every death in the whole thing. It became a kind of harrowing, litany-like read that did something staggeringly original and creative with the text. Elsewhere, I once memorised her beautiful sonnet ‘Wedding’ and recited at a friend’s, well, wedding.

Today’s poem, in terms of the project, reminds me a little bit of the Kathleen Jamie hawk one from a few weeks ago – an encounter with nature that ends up being an odder, profounder reading experience than it first appears the more you consider it. You can read it here: Body | The Poetry Foundation

Body

This is what happened
the dead were settling in under their mud roof
and something was shuffling overhead

it was a badger treading on the thin partition

Unobtrusive title, unobtrusive first line. Keeping things back, clearing the throat. The one-word title is an invitation to throw up some connotations and then see what sticks to the poem – body as in a corpse? Body as in a living body, the medium through which we move around the world?

I mentioned this a couple of months ago with the “Listen:” at the start of the Brigit Pegeen Kelly goat-head poem, but the explicit “this is what happened” feels first like a directive to be ready for what’s coming next, like an ancient bardic technique. What’s interesting here is that while Kelly was using that to really tap into a kind of epic storytelling tradition with magical goat’s heads and curses, Oswald makes the mythic and magical happen in a way that is fairly ordinary. Yes, we have the perspective of ‘the dead’ in their graves, with that lovely image of their ‘mud roof’, but then it’s almost as though they’ve just been woken up and disturbed by a badger treading. I love how the domesticity of the tone ‘settling in’, ‘roof’, ‘shuffling’ is contrasted with the metaphysical concept of the disturbed soil of a grave being a ‘roof’ and a ‘thin partition’ between the living and the dead.

bewildered were the dead
going about their days and nights in the dark
putting their feet down carefully and finding themselves floating
but that badger

still with the simple heavy box of his body needing to be lifted
was shuffling away alive

What’s going on with that archaic-sounding syntax at the start of this stanza, ‘bewildered were the dead’? It kind of feels like it doesn’t really belong in a modern poem, or makes the overall tone sound more grandiloquent, maybe? Is there a knowing wink here from Oswald where she’s playing around with that contrast between the everyday and the typically poetic? There’s nothing here so far that wouldn’t make sense to, say, John Donne, in terms of the contents of this poem, and maybe there is something Metaphysical about the use of the badger as a growing conceit for all living things?

I like the idea that the dead are ‘bewildered’ – not just by the odd sound of the badger’s feet, but seemingly by the very fact that they are now ghosts under the earth. The contrast is really nice between the badger and the dead - with his ‘shuffling’ feet, the ‘simple heavy box of his body’, the badger is very present and physical and, we realise, is definitely the ‘Body’ of the title, compared to the ghosts who are confused by the fact that their feet have no impact upon the earth. In this light the badger becomes a nice choice to convey body-ness – maybe it’s just me but I think there’s definitely something very specifically solid and heavy about a badger – always bigger and thicker than you think it’s going to be, and in such a slow, relentless physical relationship with the realness of the earth.

hard at work
with the living shovel of himself
into the lane he dropped
         not once looking up

and missed the sight of his own corpse falling like a suitcase towards him
with the grin like an opened zip
         (as I found it this morning)

So this is the bit I’m unsure of, and it’s interesting how vague and unsaid this action part of the poem is. I think what’s happened her is that the badger has been run over, right? It’s preoccupied by its shovel-work, has dropped into the road without looking, and been hit by a car without realising. I think it’s clever that the lack of realisation on the part of the badger has bled into the poem through the vagueness of the phrasing – no car is mentioned, but that macabre image of its grin ‘like an opened zip’ surely does the job, and the insertion of the speaker the poem, for the only time, within brackets, is telling us that the badger is now a ‘body’ in the other, dead sense of that word.

The badger was a ‘heavy box’ in the earlier stanzas, now it’s ‘falling like a suitcase’, which is a pleasingly incongruous simile choice that is then picked up through the description of the badger’s death wound as an opened zip. There’s something almost silly about this in the tone, but I also find it tragic, in that the badger’s body, the symbol of ‘aliveness’ in contrast to the dead in the graveyard, the ‘living shovel’ - has now been transformed into an ‘it’, and something as dull and stolid as a suitcase.

and went on running with that bindweed will of his
went on running along the hedge and into the earth again
trembling
as if in a broken jug for one backwards moment
               water might keep its shape

But is this a kind of a happy ending? Yes and no. The badger, like the dead in the graveyard, has a spirit and doesn’t seem to be aware of its status as dead. It has left its suitcase of a body and remains ‘running’ and ‘running’. There’s something of Wile E Coyote going off the edge of a cliff here, surely, not realising he’s run out of road and so not falling. There is perhaps some comfort in this for those of us who are afraid of the moment of death – it’s presented her as so unnoticed that it’s almost irrelevant.

I find the ‘trembling’ sad, though. There’s a brief moment where the badger keeps running where we feel this might be a poem about transcendence, about the spirit continuing after death, but Oswald’s choice to show the badger ‘trembling’ as it runs into the earth does kind of bring the tone back down. And that simile to finish off – the badger’s body is the broken jug and its soul is the water. What sort of transcendence is this, then, if our soul does not ‘keep its shape’ when our body breaks? Perhaps it’s better than nothing, but neither does it feel hugely comforting.

Read the poem again here: Body | The Poetry Foundation

In the comments: Am I off base about the badger dying in the road here?