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When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

- Alice Oswald
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Author:
Alice Oswald
Tags:
Wind
Leaf
Air
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It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it.

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

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.

Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn't really anything. It's a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind of information system of the air.

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop.

The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined.

I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.

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When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.

When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.