Dart

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This note gives just a glimpse of the complex labor of translation behind this work—one that surpasses the conventional personification of natural forms. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. 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. As a result of this cutting off and changing of rhythms, Oswald’s pacing is interesting and well done.

David Wheatley said it was a "heartening book", and that "Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism". I saw flashes of truly moving lines, only to have it gulped up and sent downstream to make way for the mingling of facts, anecdotes, and roles. Oswald’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.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers , her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman. Like an aquatic reliquary, now very loud, now very quiet, as if you were wading among precious jetsam. Some long poems can be challenging to read, but Dart is endlessly rewarding and gives back everything the reader puts into it tenfold. Here, and at many other points, there is delicately insinuated sexuality beneath the surface of exchanges.

At one point, a boat-builder lovingly describing his creation – the materials, the stages of work – is hurried along by his impatient wife (or perhaps she is the embodiment of the boat, his real companion) who has clearly heard all his jargon before. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. 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.I think I’ve come up now, and the drug made me feel the poetry in a way I can’t quite describe, the sublime bits of being a body in a mass of roaring water, the interweaving of time and voices with the landscape, yes actually this poem makes a lot of sense now, my sober state was not receptive. The book is a journey along the Dart through the eyes and the jobs of the people that work it, use it and inhabit its shores, their voices combining to give it a narrative, a voice and a history. This book-length poem follows the course of the Dart river, and is full of voices from those who live and work around it. This is a communal writing, and there is a unique parallax of reading what are most certainly "someone else's words" being collated into new verse. According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water".

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. I am no expert, I am learning, but I do love the connection between the people of the land (the ‘whenua’) and their mountain and river. 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. The dialogue between the contrasting, even opposing, voices of science against art made for a conflict which was built up to be repeatedly dissolved. And as the muttering of the river comes into English, it simultaneously slips back out of English and into River.

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. What Alice Oswald has made is truer to the river’s original sound—a blend of tiny interactions, roaring toward the sea. 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. It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice. 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.