Alice Oswald, _Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad_

PERHAPS OSWALD'S VERSION of the Iliad from 2011 anticipates the recent wavelet of Homer from a female perspective (novels by Madeline Miller and Pat Barker, Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey). Not that women have a larger role in this version than in Homer's--they almost disappear. But Oswald's version does turn the Iliad into its own critique: in effect, a critique of what men get up to.

OSWALD'S Memorial is a translation, but also a kind of erasure poem, for Oswald includes only (a) the poem's famous similes and (b) the passages in which men are killed.

The poem begins, in fact, with a list of everyone who dies in the poem--eight pages of names, ending with that of Hector. You will likely recognize only a few of the names--most of them are introduced in the poem only a few lines before they are killed. (Like the unlucky anonymous crewman who beamed down to the strange planet with Kirk and Spock, their sole role in the poem is to die.) Most of the poem's most famous characters--Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Priam. Ajax, Andromache, Helen--survive to the poem's end. But Oswald's version is about the larger number who do not.

When I was an undergraduate, the professor who taught me the Iliad explained (as I have to many undergraduates since--thank you, Peter Connolly) that the similes, often several lines long, introduce the images and activities of routine civilized life--meals, weaving, herding sheep, wine, weather--and so create a startling contrast to the limb-shredding havoc going on at the walls of Troy,  conjuring an image of what the society looks like when it is not at war, letting us see this world the fighting has bloodily interrupted.

Oswald's trimming the poem to simply its similes and its deaths makes the contrast that much more startling. As a good erasure poem should, it finds the poem that was already inside the poem and makes it leap into visibility. Whether one should call this "feminist" or just "anti-war," I don't know, but the sheer senselessness of the continual slaughter, with the climax of Hector's death, overwhelms.

One of Oswald's tactics made me wonder what the poem would be like read aloud. She gives every simile twice--writes it out, then repeats it verbatim. As a reader, I found myself glancingly skimming the second set of lines, unless I really made myself slow down and read them. As an auditor, I would not be able to do this--I would have to attend every word of the related simile--and somehow I think that would make a difference, make me imagine in more detail the imagined scene of ordinary life juxtaposed with the killing.

The lists, too, would be different if you heard them, had to take in every name, one at a time--in print, they too are susceptible to being skipped. But every name is a world, and hearing the name would help us remember that.