John Redmond reviews Woods etc. by Alice Oswald

Unusually for a female poet, Alice Oswald's major influence is Ted Hughes rather than Sylvia Plath. In Woods etc., her third collection, Oswald takes her cue not from the extravagant Hughes of Crow or Gaudete, but from the more restrained Hughes of Lupercal and Moortown Diary. Many of his stylistic touches are immediately visible: dramatic changes of scale, minimal punctuation, and frequent ellipsis. As in Hughes's work, Oswald's verse-narratives often veer off into children's story, fairytale and parable, and the poetic space is treated as a kind of gladiatorial arena in which cosmological forces - stars, seeds and everything in between - collide.

Oswald likes to dwell on what we might call 'basic nouns': stone, sky, water - the title of this book is itself a variation on this pattern. Her favoured mode is of natural description with a quasi-philosophical veneer. Some of her meditations on the basic building-blocks of existence - the corpuscles of the universe - remind one of Jorie Graham. Certainly, Oswalds's overuse of ecphonesis and her willingness to convert verbs into strange plural nouns ("o geometrical straightness among billowings") suggest the American's influence. Another major influence must be Heaney. The opening of 'River', for instance, makes one think of six or seven poems either by Heaney or Hughes:

in the black gland of the earth

the tiny inkling of a river

put your ear to the river you hear trees

put your ear to the trees you hear the widening

numerical workings of the river

right down the length of Devon, ...

It's worth pointing out that Oswald has a generous-heartedness, a lack of worldliness, which makes her poems difficult to dislike. There are no displays of spleen or vindictiveness, no obvious waves of ambition crashing over the reader. The business of worldly people is kept at more than arm's length (Oswald is not the kind of poet who writes about career or money.) When using an I-persona, she reveals almost nothing about herself, and certainly nothing controversial. She is not a threatening poet, a fact which by itself, will appeal to many. Her descriptive poems can be charming even when they are perilously close to bathos and cliché. The end of 'Sea Poem' is a good example:

water deep in its own world

steep shafts warm streams

coal salt cod weed

dispersed outflows and flytippings

and the sun and its reflexion

throwing two shadows

what is the beauty of water

sky is its beauty

Many of the poems in the book seem neither good nor bad, but an even mixture of both - the lack of consistency suggests a collection which has been too-hastily assembled. The poems are often good in short bursts, for a couple of lines at a time, before dissipating their energy in weak - quite often forced - phrasing. The poem 'Field' illustrates some of the book's characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Here is the first half:

Easternight, the mind's midwinter

I stood in the big field behind the house

at the centre of all visible darkness

a brick of earth, a block of sky,

there lay the world, wedged

between its premise and its conclusion

some star let go a small sound on a thread.

The atmosphere here is well-rendered; the surprise of the last line is genuine. Perhaps the poem should end at this point. However, it carries on and, gradually, its energy dissipates:

almost midnight - I could feel the earth's

soaking darkness squeeze and fill its darkness,

everything spinning into the spasm of midnight

and for a moment, this high field unhorizoned

hung upon nothing, barking for its owner

burial, widowed, moonless, seeping

docks, grasses, small windflowers, weepholes, wires

The phrase "spinning into the spasm of midnight" should not have survived - it reminds one of Denis Devlin at his most frenzied - and rather than end, the poem seems merely to trail off.

All cultures foster their private hallucinations, and for the English, the favoured hallucination is of privacy itself, As illustrated by many well-loved examples, from the Chelsea Flower Show to The Wind in the Willows, the culture persistently longs for a world sealed-off from adult responsibility and disappointment, a world of sovereign children. Given that Hughes's work is, at one important level, a reaction to such English self-limitation - in the sense that it attempts to integrate as many levels of experience as possible - one can sense how far Oswald has had to go to domesticate his style. Oswald almost entirely cancels the contemporary world, especially the unattractive middle-range of experience, from consumer debt to MRSA, from speed-cameras to ASBOs. Such a style can succeed, of course, but the repression of the public world, of so many pressing parts of experience, leave her with little room in which to move. In Woods etc., the restless adjustments of form suggest that Oswald knows that she needs to take greater risks. But it may be that the real risk she needs to take is not one of style, but one of subject-matter. One can only remain in the woods so long.

Woods etc., Faber & Faber, 64pp, £12.99

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