Alice Oswald and I'm in love again.

'And if I only could, I would' - Placebo, Running up that Hill, originally Kate Bush.

I'm in love again.

This time it's with Alice Oswald who says everyday things with clarity in such plain language that you can't help but be overcome with emotion.

She's a 'new poet' using techniques and methods of writing that vary wildly from poem to poem. I like the intensity of her writing.

Read some of her other poems, Time, Owl, Dunt. Also here, she writes on how to write poetry.

Recently, in my own writing, I've recognised that relationships, the emotional energy between people and the questions intrinsic to those relationships are the big questions that shape what I write and how I write it.

Not for nothing does everything I write have an undertone of despair, sex and love.

That's why this is my favourite Alice Oswald poem so far:

Alice Oswald's Sonnet

I can't sleep in case a few things you said
no longer apply. The matter's endless,
but definitions alter what's ahead
and you and words are like a hare and tortoise.
Aaaagh there's no description — each a fractal
sectioned by silences, we have our own
skins to feel through and fall back through — awful
to make so much of something so unknown.
But even I — some shower-swift commitments
are all you'll get; I mustn't gauge or give
more than I take — which is a way to balance
between misprision and belief in love
both true and false, because I'm only just
short of a word to be the first to trust.

More about Alice Oswald here.