Memorial By Alice Oswald

Four centuries after the first full English version of Homer's Iliad, Alice Oswald doesn't so much revise as explode the tradition of translation.

Her sawn-off, scrambled take on Homer's epic of the Trojan War smashes it into poetic fragments that resonate with the clash of arms and the crackle of funeral pyres. Hypnotic imagery and eerie repetitions set the pity and terror of bloody battle against the power of language to commemorate the fallen. Oswald's radiant poetry of remembrance will not be readily forgotten.