Dart

Product Information

This could have reached a brilliant high-point in passionate physicality when a capsized canoeist captures the river’s deadly, seductive attention, but the beauty and spontaneity of dance which they aimed for in grappling with one another was not quite achieved.

Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in Dart a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. She “abstracts” the river into poetry without sanitizing it, focusing instead on the humility that belongs in any human attempt to control or predict natural forces.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.

I did not see them on the river Dart, but as soon as you mention the bird I am transported to exactly the sort of river on which they live – fast flowing and full of rocks. 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. There were tremendous successes on the actor’s parts to get into the spirit of each voice, but it was unfortunate that ultimately a feeling of diversity predominated. From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) .This book-length poem follows the course of the Dart river, and is full of voices from those who live and work around it. 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. 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 am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. 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.

This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing. British poet Alice Oswald begins her book-length poem Dart by asserting this comparison between the poet’s voice and the river’s. Her third collection, Woods etc, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T.

A major strength of this production was how it did not shy away from the eerie and unsettling aspects which are very much present within the poem, and the use of recorded and distorted voices were appropriately ghostly.