276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Dart

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Judges for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Announced". 19 August 2015. Archived from the original on 5 March 2019 . Retrieved 19 August 2015. Following the journey of the river Dart from its source to the sea, Alice Oswald has woven a work of meandering voices that conjures up every person the water encounters on its way. Alice Oswald elected as new Oxford Professor of Poetry". University of Oxford. 21 June 2019 . Retrieved 21 June 2019. 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.

There are several examples of tinners’ huts and spoil heaps in this area and we pause to admire a ‘Beehive Hut’, built to store their tools and as a shelter. 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. Read: this brilliant blog by Katherine Venn – https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/explore/tags/walking-the-river-dart-columnShe 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'. 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. 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. 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.' 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.

Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. She read classics at New College, Oxford. Homer remains the writer who matters most to her. At 16, she was 'completely overwhelmed by the freshness. I had an absolute obsession with how you can recover that freshness. I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces'. Fairly soon we reach Dartmeet, where the East and West Dart rivers join up on their way to the sea to become an altogether bigger and broader river.Alice Oswald announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017. In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, her poem 'Dunt' won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem). 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.

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

Issue No. 11

At the start of the book, Alice notes that the 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 a series of characters — linking their voice into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margins where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.’

Earth Has Not Any Thing to Shew More Fair: A Bicentennial Celebration of Wordsworth's Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge (co-edited with Peter Oswald and Robert Woof), Shakespeare's Globe& The Wordsworth Trust, ISBN 1-870787-84-6In 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. Sharrah Pool is a popular swimming spot, and the author was persuaded (by himself) to briefly go in.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment