" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

"Stevie Wonder has been one of my biggest influences as a songwriter. His ability to tell a story and still move you, and still entertain you, and still make you want to dance, I just think is complete genius – and then watching his concerts and watching him switch between different instruments! ""At the same time, what I have the most admiration for is that he managed to put a socio-political message into his music. 'Big Brother' is a beautiful song to listen to, but he’s also saying very important things and speaking to his people. I just think, what an amazing man, and what an amazing song. He’s speaking about government and politicians, and these bureaucratic arguments that are happening – the reality of life and what impact these decisions people are making in an office are having on real people; how many people are dying, and the conditions people are living in. I think he’s really shining a light on the reality of the ordinary person, and particularly on the black community – how flippantly some decisions may be made, and the gravity of what that means for the ordinary person. ""With Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone, the commitment to being the spokesperson for the community is so admirable. The point of music, in many senses for me, is that you speak for people who may not necessarily have a voice. If you have this platform, you have this amazing ability to express yourself through music – which has so many colours to express in. ""I love how eloquently he made his points, with this simple, memorable melody. I love hip-hop so much, and there’s different ways to have a message and to express different emotions, but to do it in such a melodic way that you could sing along to? I just thought that was so clever: to express frustration and anger, but to find beauty in it at the same time. ""His reference to Big Brother also speaks of now so much more than then, in the sense of technology. He prophesied it. And he says “I live in the ghetto / You just come to visit me 'round election time” – that manipulation speaks of the times we’re in now. It inspires me – there could always be more reflection on the very unique times we’re in"