Dart

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Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings.

Oswald deftly links these many different strands of life on the river and gives the reader both a profound emotional connection with this place, and creates a universal picture of life and work. The linking of the environment with the people who needed it for survival and how the river has interacted with people through space, time and literature was also interesting. Again, this came from my boyfriend – he had to read it for a module of his, and started reading it aloud while I was there. The river Dart forms the boundary between the counties of Devon and Cornwall in western England, and was somewhere I visited often in my childhood.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) . When she takes over, the boat-builder responds to her wildly different, abstractly poetic take on the project with fond incomprehension. The river's classical past survives in the names of boats ("Oceanides Atlanta Proserpina Minerva"), combining with the accounts of fishermen, boatbuilders and oyster gatherers to freight every passing tide with memory, "a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave".

I went to the library on my lunch break and got a few of the poetry collections on the reading list, including Dart by Alice Oswald. British poet Alice Oswald begins her book-length poem Dart by asserting this comparison between the poet’s voice and the river’s.Beyond Totness bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they’re slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it’s to do with the river’s changes. How long has it been since a more-or-less new book (it was first published in 2002) of poetry from a mainstream press has impressed me this much?

But excerpting these lines is a little like taking a cup of water from a great river, both diminishing it and making it easily consumable. A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers , her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman. This is especially true of Dart, a long poem incorporating all the different voices of those who live, work and die on Devon’s river Dart. She spent three years recording her conversations with people who live and work on the river; the poem is her homage to them and to the river.The natural world of the river, the otters, eels, and oaks that depend on it, feel as alive and as relevant as the human world.

An exhausting collection, it's really an oral history in verse with no breaks between voices -- makes for an exhausting and interesting read where the character voices of the river blend into each other. As much was gained in the emphasis on having two characters intimately reacting to one another’s language as was lost through the neglect of plurality. Oswald finds a match for Mr Bloom's descriptive rhapsodies in her water abstractor, verifying his calibration records and monitoring for "colour and turbidity". Alice Oswald's Dart is a fascinating 48-page single poem that acts as both a extended "found poem" blending the voices of the people around the River Dart in Devon, England.

And then the wind's got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that've got no branches to give them balance. However, balance was an issue in the use of this technique and the actors were sometimes drowned out beneath the recording, which is a shame when the poem’s words were so central to creating complexity and atmosphere. People are forever sifting the Dart or trying to harness its power: tin-extractors, millers washing their wool and making dyes, dairy workers using the water to cool their milk, not to mention its ecosystem of "round streamlined creatures born into vanishing". A wonderful lyric poem, evoking my favourite river, the Dart, and the countryside and people of Dartmoor. But anyway, today I am doing acid for the first time, and whilst waiting for the come up I read the whole thing.