Dart

by Alice Oswald

Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in "Dart" a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. This title is read by the author.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, British Literature, 21st Century

Audio CD

First published July 8, 2002

About the author

Alice Oswald (born 1966) is a British poet who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.

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.

Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.

In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. 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. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.

Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.

In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.

Reviews

[✨ jami ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Oswald interviewed and recorded people who lived and worked on the River Dart in England, and turned the stories into this poem.

I loved the use of language in this. It's playful and often beautiful with vivid descriptions.

such deep woods it feels like indoors and then you look down and see it's raining on the River"
it sank like a feather falls. not quite in full possession of its weight"

The linking of the environment with the people who needed it for survival and how the river has interacted with people through space, time and literature was also interesting. I think this was such a great concept for a long-form poem and Oswald really brought the river and its inhabitants for life for me.

Poetry isn't really my *thing* but I did enjoy this one a lot and if you like poetry you'd probably love it

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dart is a long-form poem about a river. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. She wove their first-person voices into distinct characters whose edges blur throughout the section-less poem. She varies the form organically, according to which voice and character are speaking. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains.

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. She blends the mundane with the transcendent, cramming in as many contradictions as possible without judgment. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers.

Dart is a wonderful synthesis of disciplines, a living organism, an interdisciplinary course in history, science, geography, myth, and poetry.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I'm going back to university to do a Masters Degree in English in September. I went to the library on my lunch break and got a few of the poetry collections on the reading list, including Dart by Alice Oswald. I thought I would spend ten minutes reading a few poems and was surprised to discover 'Dart' was one long form poem spanning 48 pages. It definitely took me out of my comfort zone. 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. 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. Oswald is someone I had never heard of before but now I am left eager to read more of her work.

[James Tingle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up randomly from a bookshop ages ago, as I'd heard it was supposed to be very good and I did enjoy it in the main. I've not read many poetry books like this one, where its just one huge, interconnected poem, and so that was a bit different for starters. Its all about the River Dart, in Devon, Southern England, and its clear as you read it that the author, Alice Oswald, has done a lot of research into the subject matter and knows this river like the back of her hand. Like an actual river, it flows very smoothly and in unbroken fashion and drifts seamlessly from one aspect of the river's character to another, and has a graceful construction that has obviously been very carefully crafted. I like how she combines actual hard reality aspects of the natural environment with flourishes of imagination, and so it feels like a geography lesson, taught by a talented poet, which is pretty unique really.
The one thing that I found slightly problematic in a way, is that because she knows the area and the river itself so well, and has such an intimate knowledge of every water-polished rock, overhanging branch and darting fish, I sometimes think maybe you need to have walked along the banks of this river yourself, to fully understand all the details she goes into, as it is a very in depth, almost analytical poem in some ways...
Still, it is good and I enjoyed it on the level on which I could understand it, but I feel if you live in the area and know the river even a fraction as well as she obviously does, it will probably come to life even more, as you'll be able to fully picture a lot of the things she writes so descriptively about...overall, an evocative and lovely slice of nature.

[Arlitia Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterpiece of the long-form poem. Oswald shows us the soul of this place. 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 picked this book up while on a walking holiday on the moor. I'm so glad I did. More than any photo or map, this is a piece of the place I have brought back with me. It's haunting and lyric and full of motion and life. I will return to it again and again.

Here's just a few lines as the fisherman speaks:

But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. 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. You don't know what you are till you've seen that

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Oswald's Dart is a fascinating 48-page single poem that acts as both a extended "found poem" blending the voices of the people around the River Dart in Devon, England. Pulled from her interviews, the voices are woven together in verse without clear delineation, and thus the poem also functions as a oral history of the River but it is also filled with mythic references and a deeper poetic dimension. It's a captivating work.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always fascinated by the many and varied way in which one comes to a book. In the case of ‘Dart’ it was for two reasons.
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.
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.

This project has been brewing in my mind for some time now. Then I heard about this book, and how it had been an inspiration for Max Porter’s Lanny, which is a book that speaks loudly to me and which I love. So, there are the two elements in my journey to be holding a copy of Dart.

The river Dart forms the boundary between the counties of Devon and Cornwall in western England, and was somewhere I visited often in my childhood. I have my own deep memories of the places, and then I have others of some of the flora and fauna. There is mention of the Dipper, a small bird that lives on the fast flowing rivers of Western Europe, dipping below the surface of the water to catch small insects and then standing on the stones mid-stream making its characteristic movement of bobbing up and down. Throughout my life I would visit a river close to where my aunt lived to see the Dippers. 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.

This book is a wonderful mix of poetry and prose using voices. The people of the river give it voices. The walker, the boatmen, the poachers, the workers in the dairy that uses the water, the ferryman, the workers in the woolen mill, the dry stone waller who selects the right shaped stones from out of the river. All these different people give the river a narrative. The words of those who use the river in so many different ways.

At some points there are descriptions of the river:
“one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea”

At other times, it is the things that are taken out of it:
“You get upriver stones and downriver stones. Beyond Totness bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they’re slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it’s to do with the river’s changes. Every beach has its own species, I can read them, volcanic, sedimentary, red sandstones, they all nest in the Dart, but it’s the rock that settles in layers and then flakes and cracks that gives me my flat walling stone.”

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. Bringing the river to life, but at the same time describing the life it brings.

[Ali · Rating 1 out of 5]

what

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are soooo back 📚 ✏️

[Millie Capon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite Line: “It sank like a feather falls, not quite in full possession of its weight”

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book-length poem follows the course of the Dart river, and is full of voices from those who live and work around it. Some long poems can be challenging to read, but Dart is endlessly rewarding and gives back everything the reader puts into it tenfold. Oswald's use of metre and rhythm is so evocative, as is her use of conversations and words drawn from those who live and work around the Dart. The reader is drawn in to the living history of the Dart, from myth and to the hard labour of those who work in sewage plants or as fishermen today. 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.

Oswald deftly links these many different strands of life on the river and gives the reader both a profound emotional connection with this place, and creates a universal picture of life and work. 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. This poem is fuel: emotional and spiritual fuel to keep the poetry reader and writer exploring and working within poetry, and to keep them alive and alert to the world around them.

[grostulate]

This took me an awful, awful long time to read. My attention span has been fucked these past two months. But anyway, today I am doing acid for the first time, and whilst waiting for the come up I read the whole thing. 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. Wow, I’m definitely tripping. Now it feels like my body is being zapped by tiny aliens. Apologies. I’m not sure if this poem would have had the same affect on me sober, or in any other state. I imagine I will have to go back and it will let me remember this trip. Oh well. Maybe I shouldn’t post this, but haha my thumbs are working overtime, let’s goooo

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was fascinated by the structure of this book. This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing. Oswald works wonders with the language of the people (real and imagined, living and legendary) who abide in the realm of a river. She also works wonders with the English language, taking full advantage of sound and rhythm. This is a lush and learned and original read.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a long-form poem, it took me a while to get through this. While there were a few gems, my favourite stanzas were few and far between. The poetry got lost in the method and the voices. Overall, it wasn't for me. The idea behind this poem is so lovely and innovative, but unfortunately it lost a lot of lyricism. 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. Overall, it simply wasn't for me.

[Janisse Ray]

I'm not going to star this book, mainly because the 5-star system is so damn simplistic. If we're talking about genius, this book gets 5 stars. If we're talking heart, not so many. This is a book-length poem about the river Dart in England, told in many voices -- those of people who work & use & play on the river, as well as the voices of the river itself. The epic poem is masterfully accomplished, but I am looking for something more. I want to feel as well as think.

[Mick Canning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully lyrical journey along the River Dart. There are no suplerfluous lines or even words in the entire poem, which flows as easily and melodiously as the river itself. A book that I come back to repeatedly, to either re-read or simply dip into when I feel the need. A favourite!

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for uni!

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it

*

he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts

*

Oh I'm slow and sick, I'm
trying to talk myself round to leaving this place,
but there's roots growing round my mouth, my foot's
in a rusted tin. One night I will.

*

Now he's so thin you can see the light
through his skin, you can see the filth in his midriff.

Now he's the groom of the Dart — I've seen him
taking the shape of the sky, a bird, a blade,
a fallen leaf, a stone — may he lie long
in the inexplicable knot of the river's body

*

she loves songs, she belongs to the soundmarks of larks

*

an old dandelion unpicks her shawl

*

whose voice is this who's talking in my larynx
who's in my privacy under my stone tent
where I live slippershod in my indoor colours
who's talking in my lights-out where I pull to
under the bent body of an echo are these your
fingers in my roof are these your splashes

*

maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows

*

in that brawl of mudwaves
the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny

the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall
from Cut Hill through Wystman's Wood

put your ear to it, you can hear water
cooped up in moss and moving

slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut

with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another

*

when the lithe Water turns
and its tongue flatters the ferns
do you speak this kind of sound:
whirlpool whisking round?

*

Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap. I saw two roe deer wandering through this morning. And then the wind's got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that've got no branches to give them balance. I generally leave the deadwood lying. They say all rivers were once fallen trees.

*

I can outcanoevre you

*

tufting felting hanks tops spindles slubbings
hoppers and rollers and slatted belts
bales of carded wool the colour of limestone
and wool puffs flying through tubes distributed by cyclones
wool in the back of the throat, wool on ledges,
in fields and spinning at 5,000 rotations per minute —
and look how quickly a worker can mend an end
what tentacular fingers moving like a spider,
splicing it invisibly neat look what fingers could be —

*

all day my voice is being washed away

*

if I shout out,
if I shout in,
I am only as wide
as a word's aperture

*

a hesitation, a hiding-place

*

May the water buoy them up, may God grant them
extraordinary lifejacket lightness. And this child
watching two salmon glooming through Boathouse Pool
in water as high as heaven, spooked with yew trees
and spokes of wetrot branches — Christ be there
watching him watching, walking on this river.

*

this is the thirst that streaks
his throat and chips away at his bones

*

have you countervailed against decay?
have you created for us a feeling of relative invulnerability?

*

They stood there like a flock of sleeping men
with heads tucked in, surrendering to the night.
whose forms from shoulder height
sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.

There one dreamed bare clothed only in his wings
and one slept floating on his own reflection
whose outline was a point without extension.
At his wits' end to find the flickerings
of his few names and bones and things,
something stood shouting inarticulate
descriptions of a shape that came and went
all night under the soft malevolent
rotating rain. and woke twice in a state
of ecstasy to hear his shout
sink like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight.

Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined
in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants,
prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents,
free-trading, changing, disembodied, blind
dreamers of every kind;
even corpses, creeping disconsolate
with tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears,
still in their own small separate atmospheres,
rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feet
and lovers in mid-flight
all sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.

*

have you forgotten the force that orders the world's fields
and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad
pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,
born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,
carrying everywhere her quarters?

I'm in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.

*

It happened when oak trees were men
when water was still water.

*

They wake among landshapes,
the jut-ends of continents
foreign men with throats to slit;
a stray rock full of cormorants.

*

A tree-line, a slip-lane, a sight-line, an eye-hole

*

like a ship the shape of flight
or like the weight that keeps it upright

*

Feel this rain.
The only light's
the lichen tinselling the trees.
And when it's gone, Flat Owers

is ours. We mouth our joy.
Oysters, out of sight of sound.
A million rippled
life-masks of the river.

*

why is this jostling procession of waters,
its many strands overclambering one another,
so many word-marks, momentary traces
in wind-script of the world's voices,
why is it so bragging and surrendering,
love-making, spending, working and wandering,
so stooping to look, so unstopping,
so scraping and sharpening and smoothing and wrapping,
why is it so sedulously clattering
so like a man mechanically muttering
so sighing, so endlessly seeking
to hinge his fantasies to his speaking,
all these scrambled and screw-like currents
and knotty altercations of torrents,
why is this interweaving form as contiguously gliding
as two sisters, so entwined, so dividing,
so caught in this dialogue that keeps
washing into the cracks of their lips
and spinning in the small hollows
of their ears and egos
this huge vascular structure
why is this flickering water
with its blinks and side-long looks
with its language of oaks
and clicking of its slatey brooks
why is this river not ever able to leave until it's over?

*

two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,
and each one can hear the wind-fractured
closeness of the other.

*

he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere
like a breath flutters its ghost across glass.

*

I've been brutalised into courage.

*

Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine.

A brilliant concept capably executed. I'd love to hear it read aloud by a chorus that does justice to Oswald's almost Joycean musicality. Highly recommended.

[Charlotte Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't often read or listen to poetry but I was drawn to this one as it is a portrait of Devon, a part of the country that fascinates me and where some of my partner's family live.

Alice Oswald narrates the audiobook herself which really helps with the flow of the poems. Each poem is from the point of view of a different Devonian "character", whether it be a person or a feature of the landscape, all of them revolving around the river.

I really enjoyed this collection but I find it difficult to fully connect to poetry. Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life. It is a beautiful part of England but harsh in different weather extremes; Oswald captures this perfectly through her poems and I got a real sense of place through listening.

Overall, I would recommend this collection. 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.

3 out of 5 stars!

[Todd Denning · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love this poem, it’s a brilliant morning read.

This being my fourth read through I thought it was overdue for a review…

Short but utterly engrossing, Oswald’s extended poem is a brilliant way to sink yourself into some long form poetry. As the poem progresses you become continually lost in the lives of its ever morphing characters with absolutely clarity.

Would definitely recommend, particularly for those looking to get stuck into some easy poetry.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 stars. yes yes yes

[Roisin Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dart is a 48 page long poem, based around the River Dart in Devon. The poem explores many different voices, marked in the margins along with a few brief notes. The piece won the 2002 T.S Eliot Prize, and it is easy to see why.

I usually struggle to read long pieces of poetry, and so I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this so much. Again, this came from my boyfriend – he had to read it for a module of his, and started reading it aloud while I was there. I think this approach was what kept me interested; I didn’t read it all aloud, but if I found myself getting tired it helped to imagine it being read out in my head, rather than just reading it. Focusing on the rhythms and beat of the piece not only helped me read it but I think it also adds to the feel of it – there are places with little rhythm and places with a clear beat; this is obviously intentional, and should be read as such.

The narrative itself is a really interesting one. We aren’t physically transported along the river – that is to say, the reader is taken on the journey through the river by the different voices, going from walkers at the source of the river to crabbers and salmon fishers at the estuary, rather than the poem focusing on physical descriptions to show the river's progression. 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. The voices cut off and overlap, which can be jarring but is also incredibly effective.

As a result of this cutting off and changing of rhythms, Oswald’s pacing is interesting and well done. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids. The way she uses language and formats the poem also adds to this in an unexpected way – this isn’t set out in one way. Like the changes in voice and rhythm, the formatting of the poem changes regularly and in different ways; sometimes it changes suddenly, others it transitions smoothly.

Oswald’s own words on the piece explain what she is trying to achieve incredibly well, and I would definitely suggest keeping them in mind if you decide to read this;

‘This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. 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. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes to another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.’

I know poetry often seems daunting, especially when it’s this long, but it doesn’t have to be as difficult as all that and Oswald proves this – she’s telling a story, just in a slightly different format. Try it, you’d be surprised.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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. Form shifts with the river’s flow, formal, free verse, prose poem, and with the poem’s various speakers, also a shifting like currents, the landscape, time, and the river’s visitors and users. It is both beautiful and stimulating.

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Dart belongs to the tradition of British nature writing, poetry and prose, and shares much in common with an early twentieth century poet, Edward Thomas. I was reminded of his poem Lob a few times. Poetry is all about finding those liminal spaces, the cracks inbetween life where magic happens, where insight is gleaned, where transformation occurs. All these things occur in abundance in Oswald's fine work. Dart is a masterpiece of twenty-first century poetry.

[Ben Doeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary feat!

From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) . Each interview is transformed in the ceaseless, lapping flow of the narrative into an idiosyncratic form, a gem of language.

I love the interflow of verbatim speech (which reminds me how life is) and poetic invention.

A sample (swimmer):

Menyahari - we scream in mid-air.
We jump from a tree into a pool, we change ourselves
into the fish dimension. Everybody swims here
under Still Pool Copse, on a saturday,
slapping the water with bare hands, it's fine once you're in.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry that wrangles an element. Setting up "language" in relief to "water," the experience takes on the river's primal forces: flowing, nimble, refreshing, dangerous.

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. This is useful recycling, phonemes as molecules, energy never lost. Ego is distributed among characters that were really there: a sealwatcher, a dreamer. Like an aquatic reliquary, now very loud, now very quiet, as if you were wading among precious jetsam.

[Katrina Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Playful, varied, beautiful, modern and old. Characters and wildlife and past lives that I hadn't imagined before all being so entwined with the river. Loved it.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dart isn't a flawless work by any means, but how long has it been since a NEW book-length poem has worked as well as this one does? A very long time. How long has it been since a more-or-less new book (it was first published in 2002) of poetry from a mainstream press has impressed me this much? A very long time. Is her other work as good? I don't know. But Dart is very fine work indeed.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings..." on page 13; and at least three more. Very sloppy for a 48-page book.

[Linda Egan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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. Alice Oswald spent several years talking to the people who frequented the river, before writing their "stories" as a poem, mixing free verse and prose in an amazing piece of literature that thrilled my soul. A beautiful piece of work.