Dart

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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". He’s up against the river’s biological profile, not the macro-level of myths but the Proteus microbe, the amoeba of the same name which lives in freshwater environments. 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.

We hear the voice and music of the river and its people (all men for some reason) as it flows from moor to sea. I loved this book-length poem that tells the story of the Dart River in England and the many people that work and live alongside her. 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").The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T.

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 poem is like a novel with multiple narrators, we get to experience the river from the view of lots of onlookers and observers, crab pot workers, sewage workers, wool dyers, walkers and tourists and this vast blend of different voices made it an engaging and flowing read. But excerpting these lines is a little like taking a cup of water from a great river, both diminishing it and making it easily consumable.

According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water". A wonderful lyric poem, evoking my favourite river, the Dart, and the countryside and people of Dartmoor.

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. The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence"). A Māori custom is to introduce oneself using a ‘pepeha’ – in that you start by locating yourself in the world by naming your mountain (‘maunga’), your river (‘awa’) and your waka (the canoe by which you arrived in New Zealand). Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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.