Nobody

Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in this electrifying new work Observer This is a book-length poem a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.one person has the character of dustanother has an arrow for a soulbut their sto ries all endsomewherein the sea An invigorating book-length poem Sara Wheeler