Dart

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Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basra’s stinging first novel, is unlikely. That said it is absolutely enchanting and sublime, I really enjoyed the descriptions of nature and it compounded on my own love of the outdoors. 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? Alice Oswald's Dart is a fascinating 48-page single poem that acts as both a extended "found poem" blending the voices of the people around the River Dart in Devon, England.

This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing. I loved this book-length poem that tells the story of the Dart River in England and the many people that work and live alongside her. 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 book-length poem follows the course of the Dart river, and is full of voices from those who live and work around it. 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".I've not read many poetry books like this one, where its just one huge, interconnected poem, and so that was a bit different for starters. 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. We hear the voice and music of the river and its people (all men for some reason) as it flows from moor to sea. From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) . 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.

After interviewing people connected with the river Dart, this poem celebrating those who work on it and its natural inhabitants, was written. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Eliot doesn't go into detail about the colour of his "strong brown god", but Oswald properly includes a sewage worker, describing "a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in", overlaying her "sloosh" with the "splash" of all that shit getting dumped in it. How long has it been since a more-or-less new book (it was first published in 2002) of poetry from a mainstream press has impressed me this much?A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers , her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains.

In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus is described as "distrusting aquacities of thought and language", while Mr Bloom is an inveterate "waterlover, drawer of water" and "watercarrier". Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut… This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real work of the river.

Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England. And as the muttering of the river comes into English, it simultaneously slips back out of English and into River. 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. Soliloquies and dialogue between two actors were often outstanding, but wider group work perhaps needed greater cohesion.