Dart

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The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains. 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. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. He’s up against the river’s biological profile, not the macro-level of myths but the Proteus microbe, the amoeba of the same name which lives in freshwater environments.

Here, and at many other points, there is delicately insinuated sexuality beneath the surface of exchanges. She shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the avaliable range of tonal and thematic possibilities.It is so good to get such a well crafted piece of writing into a book form which feels and looks so good. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river.

An exhausting collection, it's really an oral history in verse with no breaks between voices -- makes for an exhausting and interesting read where the character voices of the river blend into each other. 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".

This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing. 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. This makes its dramatic adaption by Grace Linden and Alice Troy-Donovan particularly welcome, the play running this week at Oxford’s Burton Taylor Studio.

Among the local deities muttering with the river's tongue is the King of the Oakwoods, "who had to be sacrificed to a goddess", a pattern the river repeats on later victims like local bogeyman, Jan Coo, and an unfortunate canoeist. A consequence of the casting was that almost exclusively female actors played the seductive, capricious spirits and embodiments of the water, and men their more level-headed victims.

The lines and the rhythms of their speech have the syntax of the river in them—they stretch the boundaries of English sentences as they reach toward the speech of the Dart. 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.