{"id":2082,"date":"2019-12-04T02:09:31","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T02:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2082"},"modified":"2019-12-04T02:11:01","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T02:11:01","slug":"immersed-in-oswalds-nobody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2082","title":{"rendered":"Immersed in Oswald&#8217;s Nobody"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Unknown.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2081\" width=\"300\" height=\"455\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I love the verbal incantation, the spell of words cast by poetry. &nbsp; Our current social crisis, with its urgency and ER alarms, seems to overwhelm the lure of musical sound. &nbsp; It\u2019s no wonder that I love the power that poet Alice Oswald, keen magician versed in multiple voices, summons in her new book &#8220;Nobody&#8221; (Cape, 2019) &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oswald takes as her starting point a hapless side story from Homer\u2019s Odyssey, the fate of an anonymous poet.  &#8220;The poet&#8221; is taken to a remote island, left to die in a triangle of love stories between mortal and divine.\u00a0 The narrative gives Oswald the occasion to write immersively, from the inside out &#8211; immersion and dissolution in water a theme she works with seeming inexhaustible attention and imagination.\u00a0 For instance:\u00a0\u201cand the waves pass each other from one colour to the next\/and sometimes mist a kind of stupefied rain\/slumps over the water like a teenager.\u201d\u00a0  The poet delights in her mystical moves &#8211; closeups, long shots &#8211; with meditative intelligence. In the chaos of our world, a willful individual divorced from and standing against the natural world is quaint and unsustainable.\u00a0 &#8220;Nobody&#8221; is classically old and radically new in this elegy of human consciousness. The process of dissolution is also a process of recovery, a baptism in the experience of universal nothing.\u00a0 What remains is the song, many-voiced, long-lasting &#8211; a moving incantation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love the verbal incantation, the spell of words cast by poetry. &nbsp; Our current social crisis, with its urgency and ER alarms, seems to overwhelm the lure of musical sound. &nbsp; It\u2019s no wonder that I love the power &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2082\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[916,918,917,920,138],"class_list":["post-2082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alice-oswald","tag-best-poetry-of-2019","tag-nobody","tag-oxford-professor-of-poetry","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-xA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2082"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2086,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions\/2086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}