Memorial

Alice Oswald

Faber and Faber

96 pages, £12.99

An original new poem which is also a translation of Homer’s Iliad. Ancient critics praised the Illiad’s enargeia, its ‘bright unbearable reality’—the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves. To retrieve the poem’s energy, Oswald has stripped away its narrative—the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen—and attended to its atmospheres.