Dart

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British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards. Fairly soon we reach Dartmeet, where the East and West Dart rivers join up on their way to the sea to become an altogether bigger and broader river. In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection).

We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. The morning after our meeting, I ran into her again by chance. I was walking down a path, she up it. She showed me, with delight, a four-leaf clover - a huge, healthy one - that she had just been given by a shepherd. Then the shepherd showed up on the same path, looking delighted, too. 'I really believe in these,' she said. In the final instalment of our landscape and literature series, Alice Oswald explores two major themes with Madeleine Bunting as they walk along the river Dart. Firstly, they discuss the challenges of capturing a constantly shifting landscape - exemplified by the flowing river - in words, and Oswald reads several poems set on the Dart and taken from different collections - A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Woods etc and Dart - to demonstrate. Her second collection, ‘Dart’ (2002), combines verse and prose and tells the story of the River Dart from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a ‘… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference …’.

We are rather exhausted by our travails across the moor and head for the village stores for an ice cream and cold drink. Whose silly idea was it to push onto Bellever Youth Hostel for the night (mine:) Anyway, the final two miles or so are pleasantly straightforward, and it turns out to be a very friendly hostel, with the usual unusual mix of hostellers – a large Hell’s Angel biker group on the last night of their tour, a young French family and of course our motley crew. I don't often read or listen to poetry but I was drawn to this one as it is a portrait of Devon, a part of the country that fascinates me and where some of my partner's family live. Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. I would very much like to tell the story of the Aongatete River onto which my home has a boundary and from which I draw my drinking water. 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. Some of our major rivers have been given the status of legal entity in the laws of the country and so I am fascinated to protect and tell the story of my own river. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river. The river becomes tidal at Totnes (‘the river meets the Sea at the foot of Totnes Weir’) and its character changes – rolling downs, much longer vistas, a sense that the sea cannot be far away.

Tasja Dorkofikis (5 December 2013). "Poetry in translation – The Popescu Prize 2013". English PEN. Archived from the original on 17 February 2014 . Retrieved 7 December 2013. Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud.We have holidayed in Salcombe in South Devon pretty much every year for the last twenty. And bit by bit, as the boys have got older and stronger (and before I get older and weaker), we have walked further and further afield; once all the way to Plymouth (hugely lengthened by all the estuaries) and once up the Dart Estuary from Dartmouth to Totnes.

The narrative itself is a really interesting one. We aren’t physically transported along the river – that is to say, the reader is taken on the journey through the river by the different voices, going from walkers at the source of the river to crabbers and salmon fishers at the estuary, rather than the poem focusing on physical descriptions to show the river's progression. 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. The voices cut off and overlap, which can be jarring but is also incredibly effective. a b Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012.Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work which combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a '… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference …' ( The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. 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. S. Eliot Prize. For seven years, she worked as a gardener (her mother is garden designer and writer Mary Keen). Her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was written at a time when she was working eight-hour days in the garden. Is there an affinity between gardening and writing poetry? The right angle of the river we see on our way downstream just after the island is yet further evidence as to how much the direction and nature of the flow were reconfigured by the tinners in pursuit of their precious metal.

Alice Oswald is a nature poet who has been described as writing in a style ‘between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism’. She is more a ‘pastoral realist’ than a ‘pastoral idealist’, perhaps because of her own experiences as a gardener (John Clare was also a gardener for part of his life). She is a widely acclaimed poet and the first woman to serve as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in the position’s 300-year history. Judges for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Announced". 19 August 2015. Archived from the original on 5 March 2019 . Retrieved 19 August 2015. After lunch here, we then continue on the east bank to Kingsbridge. As we reach the estuary, the ferryman speaks:Alice Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people all along the Dart river - their voices and the sound of the river infuse this book length poem, in which the reader is carried along by liquid song, bounced around, churned over, and ultimately moved by this beautiful, bright poem. The first is my interest in my river and its place in native Māori stories. A Māori custom is to introduce oneself using a ‘pepeha’ – in that you start by locating yourself in the world by naming your mountain (‘maunga’), your river (‘awa’) and your waka (the canoe by which you arrived in New Zealand). After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry. I am no expert, I am learning, but I do love the connection between the people of the land (the ‘whenua’) and their mountain and river. It is at the heart of our attempts to restore our landscape and keep if free from pollution. A wonderful book-length poem, with several voices in verse and prose very skillfully stitched together, "Slip-Shape," into a "songline from the source to the sea." I began to read it shortly after Christmas, during a train journey that cut through Somerset’s flooded countryside, where fields had been transformed into shimmering swamplands. It felt curiously apt. This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. 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. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes to another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.’