[Oswald] writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, 'Tithonus, ' may be the most beautiful work I read all year.--Dan Chiasson "Best Books of Poetry from 2016 "<br />After having exhausted language once, Oswald has returned to exhaust it again, her own voice speaking over the corpses of the world's ever-present erosion...and challenging herself and her readers to conceptualize what new shape can come when the last reiterated 'whip of sparks' in the world and its many spheres has 'gone, ' and then gone again.<br />[These] poems have a distinctive clarity of phrase, line, and shape, as if they came out of a trance of waking attention.<br />Alice Oswald's poems are vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically engaged in the natural world.<br />Stunning.... If there's any justice in the poetry world, the title [Poet Laureate] should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again.<br />You won't experience the full effect of Alice Oswald's poetry unless you read her words aloud--she writes with a mind for sounds, syllables, and the patters of speech, informed and inspired by oral storytelling traditions.<br />[A] modern classic.--Book of the Year<br />A liminal text.... Unmistakably original.--Book of the Year