# Rhapsody

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/alice-oswald/rhapsody/9781787332218

![Rhapsody](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/alice-oswald/rhapsody_978-17-8733-221-8-80788d99.jpg?v=2026-09-22%2002%3A34%3A05)

- Book: [Rhapsody](https://www.bookquiver.com/alice-oswald/rhapsody) ([Rhapsody.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/alice-oswald/rhapsody.md))
- Authors: [Alice Oswald](https://www.bookquiver.com/alice-oswald)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-17-8733-221-8
- Pages: 304
- Published: 2026-09-17
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

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 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 thrilling 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.