Dart

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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. 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).

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. Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, and 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 … ". [11] Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. We are rather exhausted by our travails across the moor and head for the village stores for an ice cream and cold drink. Whose silly idea was it to push onto Bellever Youth Hostel for the night (mine:) Anyway, the final two miles or so are pleasantly straightforward, and it turns out to be a very friendly hostel, with the usual unusual mix of hostellers – a large Hell’s Angel biker group on the last night of their tour, a young French family and of course our motley crew.This is a book-length poem – a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey – about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters – Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes – who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. 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. a b Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. Tasja Dorkofikis (5 December 2013). "Poetry in translation – The Popescu Prize 2013". English PEN. Archived from the original on 17 February 2014 . Retrieved 7 December 2013.

For seven years, she worked as a gardener (her mother is garden designer and writer Mary Keen). Her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was written at a time when she was working eight-hour days in the garden. Is there an affinity between gardening and writing poetry? 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. 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. 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.' Alice Oswald interviewed and recorded people who lived and worked on the River Dart in England, and turned the stories into this poem.We have arrived, presumably, long after the water we saw arise at the source, but undoubtedly wiser about life than when we began. Terrain: Difficult going, no defined path from Dartmeet to the New Bridge, but a very rewarding route nonetheless. 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 Collection). The River Dart’s name is derived from an ancient word for ‘oak’, and on Day 2 particularly we pass through many oak woods. 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 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. We soon arrive at Northgate House alongside the abbey, offering impeccable, good-value accommodation and a hearty breakfast. it is part of the Foundation. a b "2013 Popescu Prize". The Poetry Society. Archived from the original on 1 August 2015 . Retrieved 18 August 2021. 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.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. Ted Hughes moved to the small village of North Tawton a few miles north of Dartmoor in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life. It has many landscape characteristics in common with his native Yorkshire, including the transitions from farmland to moorland, the powerful streams coming off the moor and their exploitation for power in the early Industrial Revolution. Although, as Alice Oswald observed, in Devon Ted Hughes wrote ‘clay-based poems, whereas previously they’ve been written on millstone grit.’(there’s a gardener talking) 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.

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. 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. 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.We came to the conclusion that one should not get too hung up about where the exact source of a river is, as there are so many alternative possibilities. I would draw the analogy to theatregoers who all converge on a single spot for a show, but it is only then they reach the auditorium and the show begins that you can declare them to be a theatre audience. So it is with water, it’s not until it congregates together into a body that it’s really of any significance and can be given a name.