Dart

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I know poetry often seems daunting, especially when it’s this long, but it doesn’t have to be as difficult as all that and Oswald proves this – she’s telling a story, just in a slightly different format. The one thing that I found slightly problematic in a way, is that because she knows the area and the river itself so well, and has such an intimate knowledge of every water-polished rock, overhanging branch and darting fish, I sometimes think maybe you need to have walked along the banks of this river yourself, to fully understand all the details she goes into, as it is a very in depth, almost analytical poem in some ways.

We glimpse history and place and identity all bubbling up and swirling together, reflecting sunlight, moonlight, "wind, wings, roots. Even though I had never seen (or, for that matter, heard of) the River Dart before, Oswald's poem really does give the reader a sense of it, and immerses one in it, and its history and environment. This note gives just a glimpse of the complex labor of translation behind this work—one that surpasses the conventional personification of natural forms.From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) .

Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life. Alice Oswald takes fragments of conversations from those who haunt the river, from its tinkling upper reaches, to the shadowy depths of the mature river. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut… This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real work of the river. This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing.It is so good to get such a well crafted piece of writing into a book form which feels and looks so good. After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry. I would very much like to tell the story of the Aongatete River onto which my home has a boundary and from which I draw my drinking water. 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.

The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic – they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists – and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. Alice Oswald spent several years talking to the people who frequented the river, before writing their "stories" as a poem, mixing free verse and prose in an amazing piece of literature that thrilled my soul.Each poem is from the point of view of a different Devonian "character", whether it be a person or a feature of the landscape, all of them revolving around the river. I did not see them on the river Dart, but as soon as you mention the bird I am transported to exactly the sort of river on which they live – fast flowing and full of rocks. Laura Marris’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude , Washington Square Review , Meridian , DMQ Review , The Brooklyn Rail , and elsewhere. A deserved prize-winner, and a strongly recommended book to improve the quality of your life: simply open the first page, and let the words and illustrations take you on a trip downriver shot-through with magic. Dart frequently combines the two, moving in the same sentence from religious invocation to marketing jabber ("may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world's largest operational Sirofloc plant").