Flies
by Alice Oswald
This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence
and lie stunned on the window-sill shaking with speeches
only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which
break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot
this is one of those wordy days
when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains
and sizzle as they fall
feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life
blown from the surface of some charred world
and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes
of dead skin
have carried them to this blackened disembodied question
what dirt shall we visit today?
what dirt shall we re-visit?
they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit
trying out their broken thought-machines
coming back with their used-up words
there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly
it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter
what should we
what dirt should we
From Falling Awake. Reproduced with kind permission from Cape.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2016
Falling Awake
Alice Oswald
About Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald (b.1966, Reading) Devon-based gardener and classicist, is as a poet intricately engaged with nature, and with histories both communal and linguistic. Her second book, Dart (2002) trailed the river Dart from its source, through the communities which rely on its waters, down to its mouth.
Since receiving the T. S. Eliot prize for that collection, her reputation has grown: her subsequent books – including Woods etc. and Memorial – have received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Ted Hughes Prize, amongst many others.
Oswald recalls that she began writing poetry at age eight when, after a sleepless night, she found herself ‘astonished by the clouds at dawn and realised they required a different kind of language.’ This search for a different kind of language runs through her career; her subjects – whether water, flowers, insects or Agamemnon – never settle down or still, are never simply their present selves.
Her shortlisted collection Falling Awake – including ‘Dunt’, 2007 winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – aims, as Oswald writes, ‘to speak relentlessly, anonymously, almost inadvertently, (as insects do) without using the mouth.’
Forward Prizes History:
- 2007 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, Winner for Dunt (Poetry London)
- 2005 Forward Prizes for Best Collection, shortlisted for Woods Etc. (Faber and Faber)
- 1996 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, shortlisted for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Oxford University Press)
