Columns of Greek and Trojan names confront me like a slab of the Menin Gate. As a non-Classicist there are some I recognise, most are lost to eye-skip; I think that’s the point. These are the dead whose falls crowd the next sixty pages. The narratives of the Illiad, insofar as that means the great dramas which usually shape adaption, are gone. Instead, brief but relentless biographies of death in a poetry of fate and preying birds: “It was not until the beak of death/ Pushed out through his own chest/ That he recognized the wings of darkness.”

Alternating similes see the poet of Woods etc. in more familiar territory, “When an ember of eagle a red hot coal of hunger/ Falls out of the sky and bursts into wings”.

Read in mind and not aloud, Memorial’s antiphony is in danger of achieving monotony. The masonry of the entirely unpunctuated text defies quick reading, asks its reader to slow down to a ceremonial pace through parataxis and an absence of syntactic space. Long exhaling lines have the un-fussed clarity associated with other contemporary renderings of the Greek; then a tightening of the chest into image and economic kenning. Similes are printed twice, and again the temptation at first is not to read the repeat. But Oswald’s poem demands a very particular pace and diction, and for that reason I think it deserves respect.

In the final pages the episodic interims grow slimmer and lyrical lament closes in. Oswald’s ear for pastoral is sublime as she reads ‘through the Greek’ to a near-oriental clarity, finding at best an unassuming defamiliarisation of the natural: “Like crickets leaning on their elbows in the hedges/ Tiny dried up men speaking pure light”.

Memorial is a daring way to undercut the affected tone associated with Epic. War-memorial is equally susceptible to over-sincerity, but the poem is more ritual than it is sombre. Homer’s poem spoke the fact of death, a fierce light shown here in flashes.