Dart

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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. Other minor technical and balance issues stilted its flow and undermined the value of the otherwise great idea of layering recorded voices and a watery soundscape with the words onstage. She spent three years recording her conversations with people who live and work on the river; the poem is her homage to them and to the river. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

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. It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice.Dart is "old Devonian for oak", and Oswald underlines its sacred associations by mutating "Flamen Dialis", the priest of Zeus, into "Flumen Dialis", his river.

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.Dart is a very engaging and satisfying read, helped by a narrative flow that is more easily managed in a single poem than across a sequence or set of sequences.

Oswald finds a match for Mr Bloom's descriptive rhapsodies in her water abstractor, verifying his calibration records and monitoring for "colour and turbidity".And as the muttering of the river comes into English, it simultaneously slips back out of English and into River. Laura Marris’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude , Washington Square Review , Meridian , DMQ Review , The Brooklyn Rail , and elsewhere. This is Proteus, whoever that is': David Wheatley finds Alice Oswald's river flows smoothly between Hughesian myth and Larkinesque realism, in Dart". 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.