Alice Oswald’s new epic poem Memorial is less a reworking of Homer’s Iliad than an “excavation” of it. Rather than focus on the story everyone knows, Oswald recovers the hidden narratives of the Trojan War and captures the stories behind the names of those who fought and were killed – working back over the fleeting details of their lives from the single moment of their deaths. In weaving these stories together, Oswald has managed to create a poem that is simple and primitive in its sorrow, a lament which captures the rawness of grief without idealising the glory of death in war.
Oswald claims that her fascination with Homer extends back to having first read the Iliad at sixteen and has continued to return to Homer again and again, enthralled by the enargeia or “bright, unbearable reality” of his poetry. It is this enargeia that Oswald describes herself as trying to retrieve in writing Memorial. Having stripped away the plot of the Iliad, Memorial draws to mind a list of the war dead on a cenotaph. And yet to describe it as merely a list does not give full credit to the power and poignancy of the poem. The poem is beautiful yet elegiac in its recovery of the honour of the death of each individual. The soldiers seem to step forward briefly into view, before disappearing again into oblivion, so that the poem accumulates, rather than progresses.
By restoring the lives of the soldiers, Oswald brings to life the men behind the names – there is the farm boy, away from home for the first time; the brave hunter who is killed by a single spear; a pair of brothers who fall together on the battlefield. Everyone is someone’s father or son. Oswald gives flesh to the names and gathers them in a scattered mass of humanity
The beauty of Memorial lies in its orality as much as its language. I would recommend listening to the audio recording in addition to reading the poem if you can, in order to appreciate the full impact of its repetitions and images. Even better if you can go to see Oswald recite it in person – delivering the whole poem completely from memory, Oswald does not so much read Memorial as give a harrowing and memorising performance of it, so that the images stay with you long after she has finished speaking.
