Alice Oswald has won the Forward Poetry Prize, the TS Eliot Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Ted Hughes Award; her first volume of poems (which won the Forward Prize), the slim and powerful The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, was originally published in 1996. An exquisite collection of beautifully captured moments, it finds power equally in the everyday and the unique, in the quiet breathing of lovers in bed and the efforts of a small village to avoid a visit by the King. It captures the lyricisms in the relationships we travel through each day, the power of the natural world, and the solace to be found in a garden.

There is a sense of the silent moment, of the deeper import behind everyday habits. In Sonnet, which begins with “When I sit up this late, breathing like so”, sitting up late is not merely a quiet time when the rest of the world sleeps, but a moment when the cares of the world sound out clearest. Even in “the growing soap-ball of my silence”, there is a weight there, a question and a doubt, a burden that stretches back before the quiet at the end of the day.

The collection is a mix of sonnets, lyric, and longer poems, and there is a nice balance in the variety that makes it an excellent choice for those new to poetry. Oswald’s poems invite the reader to share in the common experiences we all have, alone and in company, the silent appreciation of love, the beauty and resilience of the natural world. The language is precise and deliberate, never indulgent, and each of the moments, each blossom and wild flower, appears with astonishing clarity in the mind’s eye, complete unto itself.

There is no sentimentality here and a deep appreciation of what life is really like. A gardener, obsessed with the fate of his melon plants, loses his family to his focus, and yet can still find the beauty in what he has seen. A speaker sits, nervous and introspective, wondering what the words of love really meant. And always, always, the garden, the land, and the field a constant presence, a vital element of life, a quiet centre of the world. A place to exist and to find oneself:

Woman in a Mustard Field
From love to light my element
was altered when I fled
out of your house to meet the space
that blows about my head.

The sun was rude and sensible,
the rivers ran for hours
and whoops I found a mustard field
exploding into flowers;

and I slowly came to sense again
the thousand forms that move
all summer through a living world
that grows without your love.

Alice Oswald’s The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile is the perfect volume of poetry to slip into a pocket on the way to a walk through the fields, to curl up with indoors when the rains blurs the world outside, or to share with those you love.

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