Desprender no sono is the first book by Alice Oswald to be translated into Galician. In its pages, the author’s strengths are more than evident: a deeply ecological sensibility, a masterful command of tone and rhythm, an attention to oral tradition, and the sensory intelligence with which she understands territory, even on historical and geological scales.

“The challenge posed by poetry is to leave language open so that what we do not yet know can pass through it,” Oswald states. Most of these poems revolve around the precise point at which some kind of change occurs; they sometimes unfold in a state of trance and at other times in a moment of transition, but they always seem to celebrate that mutability of life that they reveal.

Alice Oswald, perhaps second only to Anne Carson, is one of the greatest renovators of classical poetry, which she reinterprets and subverts with skill. The second half of Desprender no sono, and also the most striking part of the book, titled Titono and subtitled 46 minutes in the life of dawn, is a long narrative poem that takes a Greek myth as its starting point and is meant to be read in the time it takes for night to turn into day at a summer sunrise. Interested in what radiates from words rather than in their solidity, Oswald creates a body of work that calls to be read aloud.

Alice Oswald

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