Dart

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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. 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. 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". The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings.

Even though I had never seen (or, for that matter, heard of) the River Dart before, Oswald's poem really does give the reader a sense of it, and immerses one in it, and its history and environment. Proteus is the god of the sea who knows the answers to questions but evades the asker, the reader of the water.Hydrophilia wins out in Anna Livia Plurabelle, which Joyce told Arthur Power was "an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water", "the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of" the Liffey.

People are forever sifting the Dart or trying to harness its power: tin-extractors, millers washing their wool and making dyes, dairy workers using the water to cool their milk, not to mention its ecosystem of "round streamlined creatures born into vanishing".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’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. Like an aquatic reliquary, now very loud, now very quiet, as if you were wading among precious jetsam.

The river's classical past survives in the names of boats ("Oceanides Atlanta Proserpina Minerva"), combining with the accounts of fishermen, boatbuilders and oyster gatherers to freight every passing tide with memory, "a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave". 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.What Alice Oswald has made is truer to the river’s original sound—a blend of tiny interactions, roaring toward the sea. This is especially true of Dart, a long poem incorporating all the different voices of those who live, work and die on Devon’s river Dart.

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 voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. The poem has been studied by ecocritics; Rowan Middleton, who published a lengthy article on the poem in Green Letters, a journal of ecocriticism, saw aspects of Claude Lévi-Strauss's bricolage in the poem.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. 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? Here, and at many other points, there is delicately insinuated sexuality beneath the surface of exchanges. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids. David Wheatley said it was a "heartening book", and that "Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism".