Rhapsody

A daring, genre-defying work of nonfiction from one of our greatest poets. Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form—before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice—and finds it still speaking all around us. “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin. . . . The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all,” she writes. What begins as an attempt to “interview” Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners, and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers, and rivers. Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence, and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognize poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.