Dart

Product Information

Read: this brilliant blog by Katherine Venn – https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/explore/tags/walking-the-river-dart-column GIGANTIC CINEMA, an anthology of writing about the weather, co-edited with Paul Farley, was published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape and W.W. Norton.

Alice Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people all along the Dart river - their voices and the sound of the river infuse this book length poem, in which the reader is carried along by liquid song, bounced around, churned over, and ultimately moved by this beautiful, bright poem. 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. shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile [10]

March 2015

The first is my interest in my river and its place in native Māori stories. 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). After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry. 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. It is at the heart of our attempts to restore our landscape and keep if free from pollution. She is eloquent about voicelessness. 'Lovesong for three children' ends with the lines: 'My voice, hanging in the/ belfry-emptiness of the throat,/ your two ropes swinging slightly.' And in 'Woods etc': 'In my throat, the little mercury line/ that regulates my speech began to fall/rapidly the endless length of my spine'. Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2011). "Memorial by Alice Oswald – review". The Observer. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012.

Like the river, the poem starts on Dartmoor, and ends at Dartmouth, in the sea. People introduced along the way include "at least one mythical figure ("Jan Coo: his name means So-and-So of the Woods"), a naturalist, a fisherman and bailiff, dead tin miners, a forester, a water nymph, a canoeist, town boys, a swimmer, a water extractor, a dairy worker, a sewage worker, a stonewaller, a boat builder, a poacher, an oyster gatherer, a ferryman, a naval cadet, a river pilot and finally a seal watcher". [4] Reception [ edit ] 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. I am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. 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. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river. To the outsider, her life in Devon seems like a version of Arden in As You Like It: 'And this our life, exempt from public haunt/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks/ Sermons in stones, and good in everything.' Only that she never neglects what is fearful in nature.Read: ‘Walking the Dartmoor Waterways: A Guide to Retracing the Leats and Canals of Dartmoor Country’ (1986), by Eric Hemery

In 2016 her collection FALLING AWAKE (Cape Poetry) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2016 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2016, and was the winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2016. In June 2017 she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2017. 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'. Oswald gives voice to a river's many voices and makes it look easy. We peer briefly into the lives of those who live in the Dart and beside it, those who dream of it and around it, those who rely upon its ever-changing waters, the waters themselves. We glimpse history and place and identity all bubbling up and swirling together, reflecting sunlight, moonlight, "wind, wings, roots." I can only share a collection of my favorite lines gathered gulp by glass by gallon. She went on to state that she wanted her next poems to reflect more complexity and open-endedness, ‘something baroque and growing, more like hawthorn’. This does look forward to the free-flowing poetry she develops triumphantly for Dart, with the imaginative focus switching from the garden to the river. It was inspired by the ‘mutterings’ of the River Dart in Devon, and was described by the author ( PBS Bulletin, 2002) as ‘a map poem or song line’ whose structure comes from the river, its transitions being geographical not rational. The documentary element is based on numerous interviews with people who live and work along the river, whose stories dissolve in and out of a plethora of voices – human, mythic, even industrial – and poetic forms. It has been most often compared to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, for its rhythmic and vocal complexity (though it isn’t a play and doesn’t have Thomas’ broad humour). Michael Longley, chair of the T.S. Eliot prize judges, aptly remarked that ‘its intermingling of poetry and prose feels natural, rhythmically inevitable’. At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.'Alice Oswald once claimed she was ‘not a nature poet, though I do write about the special nature of what happens to exist’ ( PBS Bulletin, Spring 1996). More than a decade on into her career, we can perhaps accept the poetic truth of this. She certainly is a special kind of poet – re-imagining Nature’s contemporary aspects in truly original ways. I think about those years of gardening every single day. It was the foundation of a different way of perceiving things. Instead of looking at landscape in a baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I became critical of any account that was not a working account.' In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial. Subtitled "An Excavation of the Iliad", [12] Memorial is based on the Iliad attributed to Homer, but departs from the narrative form of the Iliad to focus on, and so commemorate, the individual named characters whose deaths are mentioned in that poem. [13] [14] [15] Later in October 2011, Memorial was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, [16] but in December 2011, Oswald withdrew the book from the shortlist, [17] [18] citing concerns about the ethics of the prize's sponsors. [19] In 2013, Memorial won the Poetry Society’s Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for poetry in translation. [20] But after the book went to press, she felt troubled. She was relieved only by seeing the river again, glad to feel that it would always be 'so much bigger' than anything she could write, that it would never be over and done. 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."

I wondered whether the words came to her as she walked outside or whether she sided with Baudelaire, who claimed to derive his inspiration from the writing desk?

Dart is a book of poetry written by British poet Alice Oswald. It was published in 2002, and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. Alice Oswald announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017. Holland, Tom (17 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller / Memorial by Alice Oswald. Surfing the rip tide of all things Homeric". The New Statesman. London: New Statesman . Retrieved 1 June 2012.