Memorial

Alice Oswald’s Memorial names itself a version, an excavation, of Homer’s Iliad. In her introduction, she advises the reader: “I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.” In this version of the Trojan War, Oswald beams light on and through the names of 200 men killed in the war. In the following lines some are granted lives: families, lovers, homes, qualities unrelated to the battlefield. Some are granted individual, particular deaths. Most remain only names preceded by the names of others and followed by the names of others.

Extended similes spread like water or clouds between the dead of Memorial. Each evokes scenes from the natural world, pastoral settings, and far-away homes—the familiar world startling and strange within the litany of violence and death. The nature of erasure, and the white space in the text, breaks apart the pair being compared. The reader learns what something is like, but not what that something is. Each “like” could be stitched to the description of the death preceding, but the word also points to what has been erased, to bright light of the chasm created by the white space, and what grows in the liminal spaces erasure creates.

In the introduction, Oswald, a classist and a poet, reminds us that “ancient critics praised [the Iliad’s] ‘enargeia,’ which means something like ‘bright unbearable beauty.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Memorial wears Homer’s epic down to the unbearable, which the reader is asked to bear: the beauty of the world and the horror humans inflict on ourselves and each other. 

Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth
And watered it and that wand became a wave
It became a whip a spine a crown
It became a wind-dictionary
It could speak in tongues
It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers
And then a storm came spinning by
And it became a broken tree uprooted
It became a wood pile in a lonely field