on Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald must be from another planet. There are aspects of her poetry which I should not admire - her attachment to a locality that is foreign and exotic to anyone but natives of Devonshire, her metaphysical feeling for nature and the natural, her anti-modern attachment to the rural and its implements - and these are in full play in her first collection, where they are more significant than in the two follow-ups that have appeared since her first book's publication by OUP in 1996: the modernist Dart and the post-modernist Woods etc. Yet I forgive all these things and can't get enough for the most part. It is too easy to argue that I appreciate her use of language, for all the language in the world can't save a poem from expressing a bad idea. She is also to me more English a poet than many of her contemporaries, and I see this as an insult when the truth about England is far more apparent in the work of Simon Armitage, say, than Oswald, if it's social realism we're talking about. However, because of what I call her difficulties, her archaicness perhaps, she presents a unique, and uniquely readable, perspective.

Follow me here along a slightly different track: the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, in constructing the Folk Archive for the Barbican in 2005, a retrospective of contemporary British folk art, noted that he hoped visitors would 'recognize a lot of the things in [the show] as being things that happen around the corner from them, but other things [will] seem quite alien'. This both recognisable and alien topos is where Alice Oswald writes from, reminding her readers that there are other traditions, other histories. Her book-length poem Dart is a full extension of this. But its origins appear in her first collection, where work was being done in a similar vein: the final long poem of the book is itself a reminder of a thirteenth-century historical event, a nineteenth-century poem, and a recurrent folktale. A reminder or a rescue, perhaps, of a local mythology which Oswald relies on as her poetic space, mythologising the landscape of the southwest but also drawing on local folk traditions for evidence. 'The Three Wise Men of Gotham who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net' features the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker in a rowing boat answering a nonsensical and metaphysical question ('O the moon - / how many miles...to catch a moon?'): an experiment itself not far from the kinds of pieces Deller, as curator, included in the Folk Archive, like the woman in Bournemouth who patents clowns' makeup by painting their portraits on eggs or the cloud-loving internet group who are against 'blue-sky thinking' (www.cloudappreciationsociety.org).

If there's a weakness to Oswald's first book, and to her take on folklore itself, it is in its lack of a political edge, which her sources attest to even if her poems don't. She has always avoided the overly simplistic, and obvious in her case, appeal to ecology or environmentalism, stating as much in the introduction to her Faber anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 100 Poems About the Planet, and so this has been an acknowledged perspective in her work in general: to rely on folk traditions without fully embracing their critiques of the world around them. But she also avoids the ironies that problematise contemporary readings of folklore, taking seriously and artfully what is often seriously funny: 'and who's to say whether or not the laws of quantities apply at sea where everything is moving?' Instead, she trades politics for metaphor, where the moon is the ungraspable and the three fishers of the moon are either the hunters or the hunted or both, depending on one's point of view.

There is a certain kind of English poet who relies on a rational locality for his poetic world, with the imagination rarely moving beyond this. Oswald occupies another space, one set up perhaps by Hughes or Heaney in their imaginative recreations of the local, but aligned with a different set of tools and correspondences by her own locale. She works amid the English poets I mention, in that her space is local, and often rural, but it is not by any means rational in the sense we've come to understand that word in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile is a book of another world, detailing some other, unfamiliar life, but one that, it is worth recalling, we could all be part of now or another time, perhaps gaining something we'd not so much lost as looked away from.

EVAN JONES