To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it’s a question of paying attention. Alice Oswald Read Quote
At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I’d be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language. Alice Oswald Read Quote
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces. Alice Oswald Read Quote
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day. Alice Oswald Read Quote
If you bend a branch until it’s horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot. Alice Oswald Read Quote
It’s a relief to hear the rain. It’s the sound of billions of drops, all equal, all equally committed to falling, like a sudden outbreak of democracy. Water, when it hits the ground, instantly becomes a puddle or rivulet or flood. Alice Oswald Read Quote
It’s a question of trying to take down by dictation what’s already there. I’m not making something, I’m trying to hear it. Alice Oswald Read Quote
I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I’m not into absolute ownership of things. Alice Oswald Read Quote
When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air. Alice Oswald Read Quote
