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Rhapsody
- Author
- Alice Oswald
- Narrator
- Alice Oswald
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 17 September 2026
- Run Time
- 6 hours 34 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
A daring, genre-defying work of non-fiction from one of our greatest poets
Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form – before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice – and finds it still speaking all around us.
What begins as an attempt to ‘interview’ Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers and rivers.
Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition.
At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognise poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.
© Alice Oswald 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critics Review
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Contained in Alice Oswald’s Rhapsody is everything I hold dear. This book is a living, guiding, singing thing, a poem essay which flows over the edges of our contemporary formal limitations to revitalise language, to re-stage a lost play... Because her listening is singularly deep and nature-trained, it is so diverse, nimble, attentive and assured. It is genuinely thrilling to be swept into this wild mastery, this beating thinking heart-work. I can’t remember being as excited or as wholly engaged by a book in years. The words vibrate through you as you read, thronged by the living and the dead, human and animal in splendour and agony. It is a revitalising and radical manifesto. I will cherish it and revisit it as long as I live.
Max Porter
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Alice Oswald is one of England's most attuned, gifted and globally conscious poets — and to my mind, one of the finest living poets writing in English. Rhapsody... asks its reader to listen closely to the language of transcendence, written and spoken, without ever losing sight of the earth, the air, the water. It is finely balanced: at once celestial and deeply grounded.... Rhapsody expanded me, tuning me back into the essentials of my own poetic craft. At its heart, it is a rapturous meditation on where the power of the internal imagination meets the external natural world — and all of human worldliness in between
Raymond Antrobus
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Rhapsody is a journey into the mythopoetic substrate that nourishes imagination and memory. Oswald is an entrancing storyteller, and this work ferried me into to some of the deepest human mysteries
Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
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[Rhapsody] feels exciting and urgent… an often fascinating, frequently beautiful path through poetry. A fabulous phrasemaker…Oswald fills this book with revelatory lines
Guardian
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Alice Oswald
- Narrator
- Alice Oswald
- Duration
- 6 hours 34 minutes
- Release Date
- 17 September 2026
- ISBN
- 9781529975246
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Literary studies: poetry and poets, Oral literature, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Ancient Greek and Roman literature
Synopsis
A daring, genre-defying work of non-fiction from one of our greatest poetsAlice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form – before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice – and finds it still speaking all around us.What begins as an attempt to ‘interview’ Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers and rivers.Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition.At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognise poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.© Alice Oswald 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
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