Dart

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I am biased as so much of my early life was lived in Totnes on the Dart and this lovely flowing poem resonates with so many life experiences, from discovering sundews on the moor to celebratory dining in Dartmouth on my best friend's 80th birthday.

She asserts that the people living along the Dart who lend their speech to the book’s personas function 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… These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. Oswald works wonders with the language of the people (real and imagined, living and legendary) who abide in the realm of a river. Soliloquies and dialogue between two actors were often outstanding, but wider group work perhaps needed greater cohesion.It is about the English river of that name, and plugs conversation, anecdotes, and vivid, nearly spiritually scientific description, history and lore to raise the river to the level of a character, indeed the narrative’s protagonist—a feat hard to achieve; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, minus the humor, comes of course to mind. 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. Like other good translations, the language of these voices does not obscure the original source it seeks to fashion into English. Each interview is transformed in the ceaseless, lapping flow of the narrative into an idiosyncratic form, a gem of language. 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.

Here, what remains of that tradition is the end of the Narcissus myth—the danger of falling in and drowning if you stare too intently into the water. By the end of the poem, it is the Dart speaking, but also everything in the ecosystem it has touched, a convergence of man-made effects, ancient stories, and natural phenomena. 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. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains.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. What Alice Oswald has made is truer to the river’s original sound—a blend of tiny interactions, roaring toward the sea. A wonderful lyric poem, evoking my favourite river, the Dart, and the countryside and people of Dartmoor. 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.

Carefully-chosen selections were performed rather than the poem in its entirety, and these were ideal for bringing out a particular, important theme within the broader backdrop of the whole work. 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. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids.She shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the avaliable range of tonal and thematic possibilities. This makes its dramatic adaption by Grace Linden and Alice Troy-Donovan particularly welcome, the play running this week at Oxford’s Burton Taylor Studio.