Rhapsody

A quest to find Homer in the still-speaking poetry of today: the visionary first work of non-fiction from our greatest living poet.

To interview Homer, you have to interview several generations of Bosnian singers, Albanian and Cretan rhapsodes, scholars and angels and weavers and mourners, all of whom learnt their poetry from someone else and some of whom took it straight from birdsong. That's why I began as an interviewer but ended up as a hearsayer.

Oral poetry is a kind of hearsay, it is anonymous and without chronology. To recite the Iliad is not to recite the words of Homer, written down or sculpted in marble, but is to perform a song that has evolved over hundreds of years.

In this miraculous performance, Oswald interprets and invokes the anonymous poetry latent in our shared memory. Rhapsody stretches across centuries and encounters the possible authors, anonymous contributors, the folk song and birdsong that make up this living oral tradition.