Alice Oswald: Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (2011–)

“In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad—the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen—in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer’s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer’s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life.”

First published as Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, Faber and Faber, 2011

With an Afterword by Eavan Boland
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2012
ISBN 9780393088670
90 pages

Alice Oswald reads an extract from Memorial (video, 3 min)
Interview (Max Porter, White Review, 2014)

Reviews: Kellaway (Observer, 2011), Womack (Telegraph, 2011), Economist (2011), Logan (New York Times, 2012), Guriel (PN Review, 2012), King (Make, 2012), Stopa-Hunt (Oxonian Review, 2012), Spears (Rumpus, 2014).
Commentaries: Harrop (New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, 2013), Farrier (Environmental Humanities, 2014).

Publisher (Faber)
Publisher (Norton)
WorldCat

EPUB (updated on 2019-10-11)