Alice Oswald's The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber, 1996)

Some favourite passages:


All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling.

Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.

Work knocks in me the winter's nail.

I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.

from "Pruning in Frost"

And evening is come with a late sun unloading a silence,

tiny begin-agains dancing on the night's edge.

from "A Greyhound in the Evening, 

After a Long Day of Rain"

The glass house is a hole in the rain,

the sun's chapel,

a bell for the wind.

opening stanza of "The Glass House"

                                ...I don't want to know 

whether I've lost my heart to my resilience;

from "Sonnet"

I am bound to a star,

my own feet shoving me swiftly.

*

and my two eyes are floating in the fields,

my mouth is on a branch, my hair

is miles behind me making tributaries

and I have had my heart distracted out of me

from "Bike Ride on a Roman Road" 

                                ...people, latticed

by words but through the lattice loving.

from "Ballad of a Shadow"

I never absolutely told

the curl-horned cows to line up their gaze.

But it happened, so I let it be.

from "The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile"

...and you can feel by instinct in the distance

the bigger mountains hidden by the mountains

like intentions among suggestions. 

end of "Mountains"

The remaining passages all come from the long poem, "The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net":

A man came down, whose purpose was to catch

the watermoon--whatever flower or fish

the light took shape as, shifting and dividing. 

He was a butcher. He came shouting by

as if the art of thinking were a pommel

to pound the world into conformity;

*

                                                  ...the wind

had found a cave of whispers in his coat....

*

Now he has hitched his heartbeat to the oars.

He rows by breathing....

*

...like haiku trees, staggering to keep up

the impetus of an extended instant....

*

Three times the moon was shattered like a bowl

and slowly mended by the moon.

You can buy The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile from Foyle's Books here.