Dart

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a b Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012.

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. shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile [10] Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. A couple of kilometres south of here three tributaries join up to create a much more definable flow, and the day we walk here the exact spot is marked by a Dartmoor pony placidly grazing and its foal (cf. foal of a river). In all the time it takes us to reach where they are standing they don’t move an inch. This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads.The East Dart Valley is one of the most inaccessible parts of Dartmoor and in many ways is the inner heart of the moor. The source, East Dart Head consists of a large bowl that drains a substantial part of high Dartmoor. There are three tributaries that join up and merge at the southern edge of the bowl to form the river.

Stunning... Magic, the music of nature, the resurrection of the dead: all these things feel real when you read Alice Oswald. There’s a case to be made that she is our greatest living poet. On paper, at least, she fulfils the requirements, having won all the prizes you might reasonably expect a British poet at the height of her powers to win... Her intimacy with the land is one that resists romanticisation and gives her verse an idiosyncratic, getting-your-hands-dirty feel... Many of the poems in Falling Awake contain glimmers that feel snatched by the poet from life, from the British countryside at dawn... Duffy’s tenure as Poet Laureate ends in 2019. If there’s any justice in the poetry world, the title should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again, making music out of death, invoking Greco-Roman ghosts and summoning rivers out of limestone' Telegraph Alice Oswald has an uncompromising beauty: a strong, clear face, dark hair, hazel eyes, but she wouldn't see the point of reporting on any of this. Intellectually robust, she also has something of the deer about her - she startles easily, finds exposure difficult (one of her favourite poets is Sir Thomas Wyatt: 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seek ...'). She is impatient, I suppose, with the idea that personality is of interest. 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. 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.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. Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work which combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told 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 …' ( The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. She trained as a classicist and was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 1994. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), includes poems reflecting her love of gardening and the entertaining long poem, 'The Men of Gotham'. This collection won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997. 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. It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802

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. Alice Oswald announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017.

March 2015

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? After lunch here, we then continue on the east bank to Kingsbridge. As we reach the estuary, the ferryman speaks: