Special Collections
Costa Award
Description: The Costa Book Awards are a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in Britain and Ireland.
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Falling Awake
by Alice Oswald“Vivid . . . further proof of her bold engagement with poetry’s narrative possibilities.”—Teju Cole Alice Oswald’s award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial (“wryly ingenious,” said the New York Times Book Review) portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower. FROM “VERTIGO” let me shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain starting right now lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze