Quotes from Alice Oswald

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

It's a relief to hear the rain. It's the sound of billions of drops, all equal, all equally committed to falling, like a sudden outbreak of democracy. Water, when it hits the ground, instantly becomes a puddle or rivulet or flood.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.

That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.

One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.

I have this exercise where I force myself to look out from the flower's point of view at these great walloping humans coming down the path, and try, just try and feel it from their point of view because it's a different world to them, a fascinating hard one.

May two fields be bridged by a stile And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

The first whisper of stars is a faint thing a candle sound, too far away to read by...

What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can't get out listen a lark spinning around one note splitting and mending it and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bark, a foal of a river

There floats above the houses The implacable goddess of love With your life in her fist.

little distant sounds of shut-away singing

still in her white night clothes in the same long entangle- ment

little whispering fidgeting of a shut-away congregation wondering who to pray to

almost everything here has cold hands

or if I stand if I move one hand I hear the hiss of flowers closing their eyelids

so by degrees I became invisible in that spotted sick-room light and nobody found me there.

having had the gleam taken out of her to the point where she resembles twilight

the hour has not yet ended in which under a cloth of laurel I sat quite still.

good morning to you, first faint breeze of unrest

and what precisely is this shining

but you were moving on: monotonous vindictive