u3a Lit. Meeting April 8th 2026

We were all excited to meet at Beti’s home as we hadn’t been there before and after being welcomed in by Simon, and after a short wait, we plunged into the saga of Thørkil where more skulduggery, battling and gruesome injuries were described by our mild-mannered author.

Beti then introduced us to a long-term enthusiasm of hers: the poetry of Alice Oswald. She began with a short biography of Alice being the daughter of Charles William Lyle Keen and Lady Priscilla Mary Rose Curzon the daughter of Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe. She read Classics at New College, Oxford, then trained as a gardener and worked at sites like the Chelsea Physic Garden, Wisley and Clovelly Court Gardens. The rest of her life was highlighted by the many awards that this remarkable poet has accumulated, including the pinnacle of being the first woman Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
1994: Eric Gregory Award
1996: Arts Foundation Award for Poetry
1996: winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), ‘The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile’
1997: shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize, for ‘The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile’
2002: T. S. Eliot Prize for ‘Dart’
2005: shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), for ‘Woods etc.’
2005: shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize for ‘Woods etc.’
2007: Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for ‘Dunt’
2009: Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for ‘Weeds and Wild Flowers’.
2011: short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize, for ‘Memorial’, subsequently withdrawn due to Oswald’s ethical concerns
2013: Warwick Prize for Writing, winner for ‘Memorial’
2013: Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry, winner for ‘Memorial’.
2016: Costa Award for Poetry for ‘Falling Awake’.
2017: Griffin Poetry Prize for ‘Falling Awake’.

Beti explained how she had been so impressed with Alice’s first volume of poems called ‘The Thing in the Gapstone Stile’ that she continued to purchase each successive collection of hers. She read ‘Pruning in Frost’, ‘Poem’, ‘Ballad of a Shadow’, and ‘Privet Property’. She then played us a recording of Alice Oswald’s appearance on Ian Macmillan’s radio programme ‘Verb’ where we heard her read ‘Greyhound of the Evening’ and ‘The Thing in the Gapstone Stile’ for which she won the ‘New Poetry Award’.
The next volume of poetry was ‘Dart’ in which she had spent a great deal of time listening to the people she had met while travelling along the River Dart calling her poems a ‘sound map’. Beti read ‘Old Man finds the Source’, ‘The Forester and the Water Nymph’ and ‘The Salmon Fishers’. She also said that Alice insisted that her poems were best read aloud.
Oswald’s next volume was called ‘Woods etc.’ and Beti read ‘Hymn to Iris’ and ‘Sonnet’.
In 2009 the poet produced ‘Sleepwalk on the Severn’ and Beti read ‘Moonrise’and ‘Enter the Moon’.
This was followed by ‘Weeds and Wild Flowers’ illustrated by Jessica Greenman. Carol Anne Duffy was so impressed by this that she saw to it that Alice received the ‘Ted Hughes Award’. Beti read ‘Snowdrop’ from it.
In ‘Memorial’ Oswald returned to her classics learning basing it on the Trojan War but concentrating her energies on the common soldiery rather than the heroes of classical literature. She won the Warwick Prize awarded by Warwick University for this. We were treated to a video recording of her reading from it.
Her 2016 collection called ‘Falling Awake’ was featured on Radio 4’s ‘Bookclub’ and many of us heard the programme at Beti’s instigation on BBC Sounds. I have stolen part of their pre-broadcast introduction here:
The poems in Falling Awake move easily from the observation of the falling rain, or the stealthy tread of a fox through a darkened garden, to the sight of the head of Orpheus floating away on the River Hebron after he’s been killed, with his voice still singing as it goes. And, then finally, to Tithonus, a forty-six minute poem written for performance which is a gripping evocation of dawn - again from an idea bequeathed by classical mythology. The poem takes us, as it did one summer as Alice observed the dawn, from the moment when the sun is six degrees below the horizon to the breaking of light.
‘Nobody' published in 2019, Betty told us, is a book-length poem – a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey – about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island.

Helen then read ‘A Short Story of Falling’.
Marie read ‘Cold Streak’.
Suzanne read ‘Daisy’.
Geoff read ‘Village’.
Diana read ‘April’. 

Simon and Beti provided us all with a splendid array of cakes and beverages to bring our meeting to a most satisfactory close. Thank you Beti.