Some long poems can be challenging to read, but Dart is endlessly rewarding and gives back everything the reader puts into it tenfold. Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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.

That said it is absolutely enchanting and sublime, I really enjoyed the descriptions of nature and it compounded on my own love of the outdoors. 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. 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". What Alice Oswald has made is truer to the river’s original sound—a blend of tiny interactions, roaring toward the sea.

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. Her third collection, Woods etc , was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. Dart is a very engaging and satisfying read, helped by a narrative flow that is more easily managed in a single poem than across a sequence or set of sequences. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Also Joycean, and Hopkinsesque, is Oswald's delight in the water music of the Dart's "foundry for sounds", "jabber of pidgin-river", and the springy Devonian of words like "bivvering", "slammicking" and "shrammed". As a result of this cutting off and changing of rhythms, Oswald’s pacing is interesting and well done. The same actors, though in quasi-fairytale territory, deliver a woodcutter’s down-to-earth description of his work interrupted by the sinisterly flirtatious questions of an unseen water nymph.This is Proteus, whoever that is': David Wheatley finds Alice Oswald's river flows smoothly between Hughesian myth and Larkinesque realism, in Dart". I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. He represents the cycle of creation and death, the primordial soup, and the fear of degrading into its ingredients.

Some of our major rivers have been given the status of legal entity in the laws of the country and so I am fascinated to protect and tell the story of my own river. Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life. 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.I usually struggle to read long pieces of poetry, and so I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this so much.

Dart is "old Devonian for oak", and Oswald underlines its sacred associations by mutating "Flamen Dialis", the priest of Zeus, into "Flumen Dialis", his river.A major strength of this production was how it did not shy away from the eerie and unsettling aspects which are very much present within the poem, and the use of recorded and distorted voices were appropriately ghostly. I walk under the rapid gravity filters, under the clarifier with the weight of all the water for the Torbay area going over me, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders. Some poetry books contain a number of good poems, or give me something to think about, but Dart is one of the few poetry books that draws me from start to finish. The only real complaint I have here is that I’d have liked to hear more of many of the voices; we only get snapshots of stories, many even cut off mid-sentence just as you get hooked – but I suppose the river flows through fast, and cutting stories off before they’re finished is one of the ways Oswald reflects this.