Dart

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Through the voices of people whose lives touch upon a river, Oswald's poem brings a place and community to light in a subtle and generous way. After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry.

Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in Dart a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. 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.Poetry is all about finding those liminal spaces, the cracks inbetween life where magic happens, where insight is gleaned, where transformation occurs. People introduced along the way include "at least one mythical figure ("Jan Coo: his name means So-and-So of the Woods"), a naturalist, a fisherman and bailiff, dead tin miners, a forester, a water nymph, a canoeist, town boys, a swimmer, a water extractor, a dairy worker, a sewage worker, a stonewaller, a boat builder, a poacher, an oyster gatherer, a ferryman, a naval cadet, a river pilot and finally a seal watcher".

I think this was such a great concept for a long-form poem and Oswald really brought the river and its inhabitants for life for me. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. 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. Oswald manages to convey a richly visual picture with relatively sparse and unsensational prose, but the song which bubbles so bewitchingly out of these apparently ordinary ingredients reveals her total mastery of the medium. As with many collections, I feel like I would get more out of it upon a reread but on the whole this was a very enjoyable and atmospheric collection.You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him. A wonderful lyric poem, evoking my favourite river, the Dart, and the countryside and people of Dartmoor. I've not read many poetry books like this one, where its just one huge, interconnected poem, and so that was a bit different for starters. Like other good translations, the language of these voices does not obscure the original source it seeks to fashion into English.

Heraclitus thought we couldn't step in the same river twice; Wordsworth saw in the river Duddon not flux but continuity, "what was, and is, and will abide". I thought I would spend ten minutes reading a few poems and was surprised to discover 'Dart' was one long form poem spanning 48 pages. However, this is counterbalanced when the female head of the water-abstracting plant speaks of the challenges, importance and responsibility of her work. Eliot doesn't go into detail about the colour of his "strong brown god", but Oswald properly includes a sewage worker, describing "a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in", overlaying her "sloosh" with the "splash" of all that shit getting dumped in it. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England.Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. These faults were never so apparent as to obscure the beauty and significance of the language and its spirited, insightful performances. From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) .