A Sleepwalk on the Severn

November 1, 2018
This is not a play, prefaces Oswald (Falling Awake, 2016) in the opening note to her stunning book-length poem. Instead, it's an episodic exploration of the phases of the moon witnessed during nightly vigils along the River Severn in the UK. Visually, the poem presents like a play; characters, such as birdwatcher, fisherman, moon, and wind interact in scenes described in language not unlike stage directions. Though Oswald outright rejects such a designation, the comparison to a play is not merely formal. The pulsing repetition, the cyclical, surreal terseness of the character's exchanges read as theater, and, of course, many plays are written in verse. That aside, Oswald's poem engages the natural world but stays away from any hackneyed sense of being nature poetry, challenging readers to find, instead, the beauty in gristlier aspects of the living world. Like the River Severn, though revered, the poem offers so many mucous mudglands / So much soft throat sucking at my feet. Tender, revolting, and erotic all at once.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)