Alice Oswald’s Memorial is one of my favorite poetry collections. Depending on whether you are looking at the American or UK cover, it is either a “version” or an “excavation” of Homer’s Iliad, and the trick that Oswald so deftly pulls off is that she only translates the deaths, interspersed with some of the epic similes. Gone is all the plot, the rage of this man and the glory of that: she pulls all these characters together in the democracy of death. The book is marked by […]