Dart

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This isn't a history of the River Dart; it's a portrait--a choral portrait, if there is such a thing. The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He represents the cycle of creation and death, the primordial soup, and the fear of degrading into its ingredients. This is a communal writing, and there is a unique parallax of reading what are most certainly "someone else's words" being collated into new verse.You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him.

Every beach has its own species, I can read them, volcanic, sedimentary, red sandstones, they all nest in the Dart, but it’s the rock that settles in layers and then flakes and cracks that gives me my flat walling stone. The book is a journey along the Dart through the eyes and the jobs of the people that work it, use it and inhabit its shores, their voices combining to give it a narrative, a voice and a history.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. is a question posed by the river near the start: it set a challenge for creating the effect of many people talking through the river’s one voice that was not met. The reader is drawn in to the living history of the Dart, from myth and to the hard labour of those who work in sewage plants or as fishermen today. The dialogue between the contrasting, even opposing, voices of science against art made for a conflict which was built up to be repeatedly dissolved. The water is my only neighbourhood," Sean O'Brien wrote in Downriver, and there is scarcely a line of Dart that does not squelch with riverine ooze.

published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

In response to critics of environmentalist works of art who object that works of art "that focus on physical connection with a local environment" fall short, because they lack a globalized interconnectedness, he argues that "Oswald’s poem transcends the physical through its engagement with the river’s spiritual and mythological aspects".