I walk under the rapid gravity filters, under the clarifier with the weight of all the water for the Torbay area going over me, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders. I am biased as so much of my early life was lived in Totnes on the Dart and this lovely flowing poem resonates with so many life experiences, from discovering sundews on the moor to celebratory dining in Dartmouth on my best friend's 80th birthday. Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. 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. Alice Oswald spent several years talking to the people who frequented the river, before writing their "stories" as a poem, mixing free verse and prose in an amazing piece of literature that thrilled my soul.

The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence"). I think this approach was what kept me interested; I didn’t read it all aloud, but if I found myself getting tired it helped to imagine it being read out in my head, rather than just reading it. 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. 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. Oswald works wonders with the language of the people (real and imagined, living and legendary) who abide in the realm of a river.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. 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.

He praised the poem as ambitious and said that Oswald "shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the available range of tonal and thematic possibilities". Through the voices of people whose lives touch upon a river, Oswald's poem brings a place and community to light in a subtle and generous way. 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. The human actors are only one small part of the play, for all the wildlife actors, from dragonflies and kingfishers to otters and salmon, make their own contribution.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? This was not helped by how scenes were divided by a momentary black-out rather than gliding into one another. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

It is so good to get such a well crafted piece of writing into a book form which feels and looks so good. Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. I went to the library on my lunch break and got a few of the poetry collections on the reading list, including Dart by Alice Oswald.Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. There are no suplerfluous lines or even words in the entire poem, which flows as easily and melodiously as the river itself. 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. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains.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. Always being touched, // always creating, / I cherished being wanted / and necessary, // was glad to possess / a body that could nourish / more than its own mind.