Alice Oswald’s previous books have demonstrated her ability to craft poems which focus intently on the rural landscape.  She works in the shadow of precursors such as Hughes and Heaney, yet with an almost dogged aversion to any direct play with their work.  Weeds and Wild Flowers meets the expectations of her style, although it aims for a broader (and perhaps younger) audience.  Oswald is one of few British poets writing today whose work continues to show a strong grasp of poetic fundamentals: idea, image, form, and language.  This book’s drawbacks primarily relate to weaknesses and excesses of language.  On balance, however, this is a fine book that gives the reader more of what they could expect from Alice Oswald based on her past work.

Each of the book’s 24 poems personifies a flower or weed native to the southwest of England.  Oswald personifies eight as male, one of indeterminate gender (but written in the first person), and the rest as female.  Oswald’s characters (I will refer to them as characters to avoid the lumbering repetition of ‘personifications’) read like an eighteenth-century chapbook of marginal denizens of rural England, a list that has not changed much since Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, and the first volumes of John Clare.  Wordsworth’s rural types live on in the shadows of Oswald’s characters: the leech-gatherer of ‘Resolution and Independence’ (in ‘Stinking Goose-foot’); the perhaps infanticidal woman of ‘The Thorn’ (in ‘Rambling Rose’); and Goody Blake’s chill-curse (in ‘Interrupted Brome’).  In this tradition, Oswald’s flower poems attempt to explore the psychology of rural social ills.

While the grotesqueness Oswald pursues in Weeds and Wild Flowers lies in humanity, not wild nature, Oswald shows a flair for connecting the two.    The life-cycle of Oswald’s ‘Primrose’, for example, begins like a nursery rhyme, mimicking the language of one of Blake’s Songs of Innocence: ‘First of April—new born gentle.’  The first stanza contains strong images: ‘a yellow dress that needs no fastening’, and a child-flower who ‘stands/ clutching for balance with both hands.’   The second stanza introduces the poem’s theme of a life in microcosm.  By the final octet, the poem has become a Vanitas in progress:

April the thirteenth.  Almost dead.
Face like wet paper.  Hanging yellow head.
Still there.  Still dying.  Fourteenth of April.
Face fading out.  Expression dreadful.
Fifteenth sixteenth.  So on so on.
Soul being siphoned off.  Colour gone.
April the seventeenth.  Dead.  Probably.
Skull in the grass.  Very light and crumbly.

Although the last two feet of the poem sabotage the stanza (and almost the poem itself—it should end with the half-line), this is one of the volume’s better poems.  It offers a paradigm of the book’s characters: marginal or abandoned figures, usually female, lost in the rural landscape.

The book’s unsettled, frequently grotesque mood demonstrates its greatest strength: its ability to find fresh material in a narrow plot of ground.  Oswald’s body of work to date has attracted criticism for its persistent close focus on a local landscape—the ‘safe’ themes of her Devon home.  Yet close reading of this collection, despite its broader ‘coffee-table’ approach, dispels any accusation that Oswald is playing it safe.  She has gone looking for some of the wildest and ugliest flora in the garden, and she has not, as the saying goes, found their inner beauty.  If anything, she has erred on the side of Brobdingnagian magnification, both in grossness of botanical (or rather, physiological) detail, and in awkwardness of feeling.

In ‘Bristly Ox-tongue’, for example, the collection’s sense of decrepitude and physical rot escalates into the morbid image of a mute, animalistic figure, wrecked rather than made wise by age:

He stands rooted
with his white hair uncombed,
pulling it out in handfuls.
This is no good.

Long silence.
He carries this silence everywhere,
like an implement from long ago,
he carries it everywhere.

Similarly, Oswald uses occasional close-up images of the flowers’ surface textures to give tangible qualities to their psychologies.  Snowdrop ‘shivers in a shawl/ of fine white wool’.  Scarious Chickweed has ‘poor wilted hands/ winding and strangling a sweetwrapper’.  And Yellow Iris ‘has one/ gold-webbed glove,/ one withered hand.’  Throughout the book, deformity counterbalances beauty; youth means mental and physical vulnerability—and age, the same.

In their treatment of marginalized rural characters, the poems of Weeds and Wild Flowers show cohesion of theme and motif.  Yet for the most part, the collection as a whole avoids repetitiveness.  Oswald manages to keep the succession of flower poems fresh through two principal mechanisms: variation of form, and variation of perspective.

The poems in Weeds and Wild Flowers employ a variety of forms, most of them unfixed, to match the personalities of the book’s suffering or psychologically unstable characters.  One form predominates, but is open enough to permit variation.  ‘Thrift’, a good example of this form, begins:

Born by the sea.
Used to its no-hope moan.
Forty or thereabouts.
Lived on her own.

The form is a list of qualities, arranged in blunt statements, in variable two- or three-beat lines, end-stopped.  The poems employing this form read more like notes in a botanist’s or psychologist’s notebook, but the form’s rhythm and spare grammatical construction convey a sharp sense of character.  Its short-lined, imagistic style is reminiscent of H.D.’s, though thankfully without that poet’s Biblical syntax and often overbearing first-person voice.

Other forms break up the monotone of this predominant form.  ‘Red-veined Dock’ reads like a child’s improvised rhyming:

knock knock
knock knock
dear red-veined
liver-skinned
scalpel-trained
feeler of glands
with your soap-sweet hands
and warm glass wands

Here, form suits content: an incantatory rhythm for a poem of medicine and magic, with its surgical and pharmaceutical images (‘glass wands’, ‘blood-stained’).  Unfortunately, the poem’s repeated single rhymes veer away from incantation, and start to sound more like hip-hop lyrics (‘I know you/ Dr Go-Slow/ with your thick black eyebrow/ and your bristly beard-shadow/ I know I know/ your noisy nose-blow’)—equally skilful, but out of place.  The poem’s limp philosophical closing (‘there is no… remedy/ for mortality/ except mortality’) seems more suited to the playground or pop radio.  Nevertheless, the poem’s morbid imagery lingers in the reader’s mind.

The feeling of variety in the volume, despite its uniformity of content, also comes from frequent changes in perspective.  ‘Violet’, for example, gives the reader the experience of picking and smelling a flower from the flower’s perspective:

her horrified mouseface, sniffed and lifted close,
let its gloom be taken and all the sugar licked off its strangeness

In ‘Daisy’, the first-person voice is the poet’s; the flower, still personified, is the object:

I will not meet that quiet child
roughly my age but match-size
I will not kneel low enough to her lashes
to look her in her open eye…
……………………………………………
because she is more
summer-like more meek
than I am I will push my nail
inter her neck and make
a lovely necklace out of her green bones

Here there is a nice instability between flower-murder—the ‘outrage’ of Dorothy Wordsworth pulling a strawberry flower—and a more cruel jealousy.

‘Procumbet Cinquefoil’, the best poem in the volume, also uses perspective to fit its content and strengthen its personification and mood.  Hidden close to the end of the book, this is the volume’s only poem in the first person.  The poem begins:

That’s that.
Flat on my face forever now.

The field
fully inhaled
and folded in its wings.

I’ll tell you how it looks
without hope
at the groundfloor level of a hedgerow
lying staring at my handscape.

In the best tradition of poetic self-examination and self-deflation, this is a poem of literal prostration to the landscape.  The promised description pays off:

A carcass of stalks
through whose ribs the moon falls
like water
to the creeping base of everything.

And everyone is tall
and elsewhere.

Here is a moment of vision as sharp and full as what can be found in the Imagism of Amy Lowell, Pound, and H.D., or the Chinese and Japanese poets who inspired their minimalism.  (These lines bring to mind Roseki’s haiku beginning, ‘Without a friend/ discarded in the fields….’)   ‘Procumbent Cinquefoil’ most successfully attains the volume’s clear goal of minimalism.  Its theme is universal: the impulse to lie down in an open field, whether from delight or exhaustion.

Weeds and Wild Flowers is a confident, well-crafted book.  Like any experiment in singular vision, however, it suffers from certain myopic effects.  The two main problems in the book are a lack of concrete description, and unnecessary excesses of language.

In the book’s preface, Oswald anticipates the criticism that the poems which follow are not nature studies:

My hope is that the experience of reading and looking at the book will be a slightly unsettling pleasure, like walking through a garden at night, when the plants come right up to the edges of their names and then beyond them.  It is not, for that reason, a reliable guide to wild flowers, though it may be a reliable record of someone’s wild or wayside selves.

This statement implies that the book is a psychological guide, and that the flowers in the poems should be read as explicitly symbolic.  It is problematic, however, that Oswald’s personifications deliberately start from the flowers’ names, and not from their appearances or habitats.  Given that this is ostensibly a book about weeds and wild flowers, the minimal botanic imagery throughout the book causes distancing and even disconnection between the flowers and their personifications.  This results in some flat poems.

‘Bastard Toadflax’ illustrates this problem.  Its human personification reaches towards a second personification, after the animal in the weed’s name; like a toad, the man ‘Pushes pudge of tongue-tip/ into bulge of lower lip.’  With a sixteenth-century sense of physiognomy, appearance matches character, as we learn that Bastard Toadflax is indeed a bastard:

Full of blotches.
Wide-mouthed, winking.
Has monstrous appetites.
Is always drinking.

Many a helpless motherly lass
smoothes down her dress,
cooks quantities of porridge.
And mentions marriage.

These are enjoyable lines.  However, in personifying a weed as a man and a man as a toad, the sense of the weed vanishes.  Oswald’s preface says that she uses ‘the names of flowers to summon up the flora of the psyche’.  But here there is no working through the idea: the weed named bastard toadflax produces a poem about a man who looks like a toad and acts like a bastard.  For landscape-minded readers who can conjure mental images of specific flora at will, the weed (Comandra umbellata) plays into the poem obliquely, in that, for a parasite, it produces attractive white flowers; and in bloom, these flowers and their buds can be ‘Full of blotches.’  But this is an obscure link.  The reader knows from the volume’s context that this is a poem about a weed; yet the poem does not bear on the weed, or the weed on the poem.

Oswald’s preface heads off this criticism.  But from a writer who has worked as a gardener, and demonstrated the strength of her own natural eye in past collections, many of these poems seem disconnected—not from the human heart, which would have ruined the book—but from the materials of their inspiration.  They occasionally come across as poems about flowers by someone who has not bothered to look closely at flowers, an accusation which could hardly be leveled at Dickinson, Lawrence, or Hughes—or Oswald, at her best.  ‘Bastard Toadflax’ may be a pleasure to read, but like other poems in the book, it leaves the reader feeling that more could have been accomplished with the material.

The uneasy relationship between the poems and Greenman’s etchings reinforces this problem.  Oswald and Greenman have gone out of their way to prevent any alignment between the poems and the etchings.  Doubtless, Oswald wished to avoid the safe, coffee-table-book experience of ‘read a poem about a flower, look at a picture of the flower, and compare the two.’  But instead, the reader must grapple with a book called Weeds and Wild Flowers in which most of the poems fall into the former category, and most of the etchings into the latter.  This is a problem: while amateur naturalists might be able to conjure mental images of some of Oswald’s weeds without help, many readers would probably prefer to see illustrations of ‘Stinking Goose-foot’, ‘Bargeman’s Cabbage’, and ‘Hairy Bittercress’, rather than pictures of violets, pansies, daisies, and other common flowers.  To make matters worse, among those poems which do match illustrations, not all have been laid out together.  (The poems ‘Violet’, ‘Snowdrop’ and ‘Primrose’ are adjacent to their illustrations, but ‘Daisy’ is not.)  This is another sign that Oswald and Greenman are attempting to foil the reader from making any comparisons between their work—a futile step in a collaborative book.

The book’s other major problem is soft or careless language, which works against the unheimlich mood created by the best individual poems, and the book as a whole.  Reading Weeds and Wild Flowers against Oswald’s body of work shows that the new book lacks the tight control of language she has demonstrated in the past.  Oswald is an accomplished crafter of formal and open-form poetry; therefore, the verbosity and looseness of phrase which pervade this book must be intentional.  But if this looseness was a choice, it is difficult to see why it was made, as the poems with the loosest language do not pay off.

The facing-page poems ‘Fragile Glasswort’ and ‘Narrow-lipped Helleborine’ exemplify this problem.  The poems are twins, sharing the same form (eight couplets arranged in quatrains) and the same content (young, emotionally fragile women).  Both poems employ feminine rhymes that fall short of Oswald’s capabilities (although ‘sleepwalks’/’spokes’ is fine).  In a book with many open-form poems, this problem might be overlooked, but Oswald raises the reader’s expectations of strong off-rhyme in the book’s opening poem, ‘Stinking Goose-foot’, with its ‘biscuits’/‘itches’ and ‘veins’/‘strange’.  The rhymes of these two facing poems might suit their themes, but the poetic visualization of feminine weakness could have been explored with a stronger technique.

Besides problems of rhyme, the two poems suffer from an excess of adjectival description and adjectival phrases.  This flaw stalls character development.  ‘Helleborine’, for example, begins:

I’m worried about Helleborine.  So hard-worked, so discreet.
So unhappy, so accepting, so reliable and so mute.

The poem recovers from its weak opening, but these lines warn of the danger of forgetting the first lesson of good writing—show, don’t tell.  Other poems similarly demonstrate stunted character development due to adjectival excess.  ‘Pale Persicaria’, for example, contains the phrase, ‘Immense/ lustless listless wishfulness/ under her angle-poise heart.’  Here Oswald plays up the excess, but the phrase strains the ear.  An ‘angle-poise heart’ is an awkward synecdoche, but an original image, and the flood of consonance that precedes it diminishes its punch.  ‘Hairy Bittercress’ shows the same mix of originality and excess in the flower’s ‘ardent cindery shrew-small eyes’: a phrase in which three quite powerful modifiers negate each other’s momentum in a pile-up.  Finally, ‘Slender Rush’ contains the worst excesses.  In the midst of an apposite personification, we get:

Too morbidly
unblinking to answer,
too trembling and hurriedly
grumbling to herself.

Too off-hand,
too unwholesome is her manner.

This is too much: seven adjectives and adverbs (including the present participles) in six lines requires a re-thinking of the way the character is presented, and the poem constructed.

Finally, one of the most curious things about the poems in Weeds and Wild Flowers is their lack of attachment to the corpus of flower lore in English poetry.  The lack of allusion in the book must have been another deliberate choice, given Oswald’s classical education, and the depth of local research evident in poems such as Dart.  Allusion should never endanger a poem’s clarity of image or originality of expression; but I cannot detect in these poems any play of meaning on a literary—as opposed to psychological—level.  The connections between Oswald’s rural subjects and the Wordsworthian characters mentioned above exist only through the reader’s associations; Oswald’s weeds have no visible roots in the English pastoral tradition.  This seems like a lost opportunity.  I cannot read ‘Red-Veined Dock’ without thinking of The Tempest’s ‘docks and mallows’, or ‘Primrose’ without thinking of Milton’s ‘rathe primrose that forsaken dies’, and Wordsworth’s repeated symbolic use of this flower.  Flowers and their symbolic readings constitute a fundamental current of classical and modern literature, into which all good nature poetry must tap.  Much of Oswald’s book is good nature poetry; yet it does not do this.  Its resistance to allusion could be a mark of greatness—or a weakness.

Weeds and Wild Flowers contains many strong poems.  Other poems demonstrate flashes of Oswald’s keen gaze, but casual phrasing wraps their sharp ideas in cotton wool—in the same way that a morbid nursery rhyme becomes harmless through centuries of repetition.  Oswald may be aiming for ambiguity, but her chosen technique creates vagueness.  As a result, despite their unsettling mood, many of these poems are too safe and too ‘comfortably edgy,’ and leave me wishing for more of ‘the pearl’s cold quality’ of her earlier work.

Nevertheless, excesses of language aside, this is a fine book of poems.  In its grasp of the relationship between idea, image, and form, it proves itself stronger than much of what is currently being published.  The book would benefit from one of two editorial approaches—which in keeping with the book’s theme, could be compared to gardening styles.  Oswald could trim the excessive adjectival phrases and indecisive modifiers that rob some of her more stark creations of their nettled edges.  However, as a wiser alternative, I would suggest that she let the garden grow wild.  This book’s subject matter calls for a change in style.  Oswald should discard her careful—if skilful—minimalism, get into the mire, and let the weeds creep out of the reader’s peripheral vision and into a more concretely observed, more linguistically knotty centre.

Good poets must develop three skills which, in combination, produce excellent poetry—but three skills which can undermine each other.  These skills are mastery of craft, mastery of content, and mastery of perception or philosophy (skills which might correspond, on a practical level, to Pound’s three ‘kinds of poetry’: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia).  Poets must master the craft of writing—the use of structure, line, and language—but like any other writer they need something to write about.  Content has become the weakness of many contemporary poets: not because they lack it, but because they have it in excess.  Like postmodern novelists, they can specialize themselves into the richness of a character, a landscape, or a journalistic moment—but at the risk of losing the poetic line.  This is why many erudite contemporary poems read like laundry lists; the poet does not control their content through craft, or connect it to the body of living poetry through holistic reductiveness.

In general, Oswald’s book avoids this pitfall and balances the three skills in question.  If at times she sacrifices one, it is the second, in that she allows the characters of the weeds and flowers to escape their literal forms to such a degree that they leave an insufficient concrete impression in the reader’s mind.  But at a pinch, this was the correct sacrifice to make.  Based on her previous books, the attentive reader can grant Oswald some leeway in veering from an exacting description of the landscape, in exchange for her providing memorable representations of its marginal inhabitants.  Oswald’s poems do not address the larger social and philosophical questions of why the poor, homeless, and disturbed rural figures that populate Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals persist in the modern rural landscape—but we know they do.  If Weeds and Wild Flowers fails to draw our attention to the roots of particular social ills, it provides lingering, discomforting portraits of what it is to live with their effects.

Alice Oswald, Weeds and Wild Flowers, Faber and Faber, 2009. £14.99. 978-0-571237-49-4

© C.E.J. Simons, 2009

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.