Title: The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile
First published: 1996
Description: This is Alice Oswald's first book of poems. More confident and achieved than many first collections, it shows her writing in an already distinct voice. The poems are intensely musical: she recites them from memory. Influenced by the rhythms of Hopkins, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language.

A long poem, 'The Wise Men of Gotham', which makes up the second part of the book, is, by contrast, a version of the folk-legend about the three men who went to sea in a boat in an attempt to catch the moon in the net.
Subjects: Poetry (poetic works by one author), Poetry, Ps3565.s96 m46 1996, 811/.54
LC classification: PR6065.S98 T48 1996