Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad

by Alice Oswald

Book Overview

In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad--the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen--in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer's glance. The resulting...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393347273
• ISBN13: 9780393347272
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful and deeply affecting

This book is a sort of translation of the Iliad--but it is also much more. Oswald takes each of the deaths in the original epic poem and isolates them, making their brutality and the effects they have on those connected with the soldiers much starker. The language is really beautiful and took my breath away. People who love the Iliad will find this version really interesting- it takes the epic and makes it an elegy.