Cleansing and toning

摘要

Emily dickinson, a 19th-century poet, thought that poets, at their best, "rinsed the language". They made language anew by cleansing it of the accumulated crud of cliche, sloppiness and general woolliness. Alice Oswald, a young English poet whose latest collection "Woods etc" (Faber and Faber, $23.27 and £12.99) has just been shortlisted for the Forward prize, is one such poet. In it, she writes about natural phenomena-stones, seeds, stars and what happens when you stand outside on an Easter night and look up at the sky-in a mood of muted ecstasy, which helps you see the world anew.