Alice Oswald's Rhapsody: A Manifesto traces poetry from Homer to Ted Hughes

Alice Oswald, Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, has published her first full-length book, Rhapsody: A Manifesto, a twisting, beguiling investigation into the art of poetry that ends in a call to arms on behalf of the natural world.

Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. Her Oxford lectures remain available online. But a complete book of prose is something of an occasion for a poet whose reputation rests on verse.

So what exactly is it? For a work of prose, it contains a lot of poetry, much of it translated or composed by Oswald herself. Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Ted Hughes also feature. Though the book is nonfiction, it is full of stories, particularly retellings of Homer and Aeschylus.

The publisher bills it as "genre-defying", and there is much formal experimentation on the page. But at heart it is an exploration of the oral tradition — a history of the spoken word stretching from Homer to Hughes. Oswald's own subtitle, A Manifesto, feels exciting and urgent, pointed at the contemporary world with its pressing realities.

The book's closing appeal on behalf of the natural world signals where Oswald wants the spoken word to go next: outward, toward the imperilled environment, and away from the page-bound tradition she spends much of the book anatomising.