Dart

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We spent our last night in the Nelson suite of the Bayards Cove Inn, which has great views over the rooftops down to the estuary and the sea. This is a book-length poem – a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey – about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters – Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes – who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. Mary Keen interview: 'people have accused me of being too traditional' ". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023.

Our next stop is the East Dart Waterfall, a veritable beauty spot with an unusual curtain of water falling diagonally down a seven-foot drop, and then rushing over a series of large ledges to a pool below. She would certainly have been familiar with his intimacy with The Dart when she came to write her poem. She also compiled ‘A Ted Hughes Bestiary’ (2016), a compilation of his writing about animals real and invented. Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. Terrain: Difficult going, only to be attempted in good weather; wear gaiters and good walking boots, walking poles are helpful, can be very boggy underfoot.

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She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two - walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn't take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a 'non-verbal level'. She thinks 'a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting'. Only later comes the 'plastic art of finding the words'. In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. A wonderful book-length poem, with several voices in verse and prose very skillfully stitched together, "Slip-Shape," into a "songline from the source to the sea." In the final instalment of our landscape and literature series, Alice Oswald explores two major themes with Madeleine Bunting as they walk along the river Dart. Firstly, they discuss the challenges of capturing a constantly shifting landscape - exemplified by the flowing river - in words, and Oswald reads several poems set on the Dart and taken from different collections - A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Woods etc and Dart - to demonstrate. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, Burke's Peerage, Ltd, 2003, p. 1987

Read about the Faber story, find out about our unique partnerships, and learn more about our publishing heritage, awards and present-day activity. Ted Hughes moved to the small village of North Tawton a few miles north of Dartmoor in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life. It has many landscape characteristics in common with his native Yorkshire, including the transitions from farmland to moorland, the powerful streams coming off the moor and their exploitation for power in the early Industrial Revolution. Although, as Alice Oswald observed, in Devon Ted Hughes wrote ‘clay-based poems, whereas previously they’ve been written on millstone grit.’(there’s a gardener talking) Overall, I would recommend this collection. 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. Once, she had to carry a pane of glass for a greenhouse window and felt that only by meditating on it, through 'sheer concentration', would she keep it from shattering. This is how she felt holding her first baby, 'something more precious to me than anything I have ever known'. Alice Oswald is a nature poet who has been described as writing in a style ‘between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism’. She is more a ‘pastoral realist’ than a ‘pastoral idealist’, perhaps because of her own experiences as a gardener (John Clare was also a gardener for part of his life). She is a widely acclaimed poet and the first woman to serve as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in the position’s 300-year history.

Issue No. 11

In 2009 she published both A sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England. She has succeeded in finding a freshness of her own - and a playfulness. Take the serious tease of the title's 'etc'. She says: 'I love etc and dot dot dot. I feel the universe is constructed with an etc. I am really happy starting a sentence, it is finding an end that is difficult.' She is a sparing user of full stops. She has spent this year, as an experiment, writing prose, although it is 'not really prose'. She finds prose is sometimes 'better at detail'. In poetry, she is 'so seduced by sound'. Faber & Faber was founded nearly a century ago, in 1929. Read about our long publishing history in a decade-by-decade account.

Alice Oswald interviewed and recorded people who lived and worked on the River Dart in England, and turned the stories into this poem. Fairly soon we reach Dartmeet, where the East and West Dart rivers join up on their way to the sea to become an altogether bigger and broader river. Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead: “All vigorous men / All vanished”' TelegraphOswald’s playful and expansive uses of language and metaphor, as well as her seamless blending of the mundane and transcendent, bring her characters and the river they speak of vividly to life. She blends the mundane with the transcendent, cramming in as many contradictions as possible without judgment. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. I began to read it shortly after Christmas, during a train journey that cut through Somerset’s flooded countryside, where fields had been transformed into shimmering swamplands. It felt curiously apt.

Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth All poetry has a memorial aspect – the fixing of a moment, a place, the passing of a life. But this is remembering on a grand scale. This is a concentrated, intense, multi-tasking elegy. And it is written with a freshness to match Homer's own – as if each soldier had died on the day of writing' ObserverWe cross over on the Dittisham Ferry to look at Agatha Christie’s house at Greenway (NT), the gardens are an absolute joy to walk around and they let Sam play Agatha’s piano (she had nearly become a concert pianist, but was apparently too overcome by nerves to perform in public). So then I read all the Hughes poems I could lay my hands on and what they all had in common was that imaginative grasp of the present – that ability to speak strictly within one moment and not through a misted screen of remembered moments.’