Read, if just for the wonderful similes which tumble out with the relentlessness of the war and destruction they describe. But Oswald's The Thing In The Gap Stone Stile remains my favourite collection of hers.
Just to prove she's also a dab hand with a metaphor, here - on a seasonal note - is her description of frost (from "Pruning In Frost"):
Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,
and again:
All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling
Wowzers. It's not all new-fangled stuff though. I've enjoyed a lingering re-visit to Ezra Pound's shorter poems.
It's hard not to read them without superimposing that slow, rumbling voice of his over the top, which only adds to the richness of the experience. He's another one who can work a simile - here, from "The Garden" :
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia.
How's that for an opening sentence? You've gotta love him. Apart from the fascism. And the insanity.
In the spirit of mixing similes 'n' metaphors 'n' that, I'll leave you with this: in the way an ancient heiffer heaves herself up from rest and makes her way, in a swaying plod across the field, I set out upon the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Reader, goodnight.
