Award-winning poet Alice Oswald explores the vital poetry of Homer and the classical world, and why it still speaks to us today.

"I've always felt that Homer is a contemporary poet, an avant-garde poet... Homer's poetry is more alive than a lot of what we read as poetry nowadays." Alice Oswald

Why have certain texts, like the Odyssey and the Iliad, survived for thousands of years?

After a lifetime of thinking about the poetry of the classical world, the award-winning poet Alice Oswald began exploring this question during her appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

What emerged was an extraordinary story, of an oral tradition drawn from everyday speech and the wild sounds of the natural world. Not a dead language, but a literary form that is both embodied and alive, and continues to speak to us today, in our beleaguered present.

In her groundbreaking new book Rhapsody: A Manifesto, Oswald looks at the vital origins of poetry itself, from the classical world to Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Ted Hughes.

Join us at The Tabernacle for a unique evening with one of our finest living poets, as she reads from some of the world's greatest poems, and shares thrilling insights into her own practice.

Alice Oswald will be live in conversation; interviewer to be announced soon.

Praise for Rhapsody

'This book is a living, guiding, singing thing... I will cherish it and revisit it as long as I live.'- Max Porter

'One of the finest living poets writing in English'- Raymond Antrobus

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and has published several poetry collections, including Dart – a long poem about a river – and Memorial, a version of Homer's Iliad. She has been awarded the T.S Eliot Prize, Forward Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize and Costa Poetry Award. She was Oxford professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2024.

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