Oswald gives voice to a river's many voices and makes it look easy. 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. We glimpse history and place and identity all bubbling up and swirling together, reflecting sunlight, moonlight, "wind, wings, roots." I can only share a collection of my favorite lines gathered gulp by glass by gallon.(view spoiler)[ listen, a lark spinning around onenote splitting and mending it*he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts*Oh I'm slow and sick, I'm trying to talk myself round to leaving this place, but there's roots growing round my mouth, my foot's in a rusted tin. One night I will.*Now he's so thin you can see the lightthrough his skin, you can see the filth in his midriff.Now he's the groom of the Dart — I've seen himtaking the shape of the sky, a bird, a blade,a fallen leaf, a stone — may he lie long in the inexplicable knot of the river's body*she loves songs, she belongs to the soundmarks of larks*an old dandelion unpicks her shawl*whose voice is this who's talking in my larynxwho's in my privacy under my stone tentwhere I live slippershod in my indoor colourswho's talking in my lights-out where I pull tounder the bent body of an echo are these yourfingers in my roof are these your splashes*maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows*in that brawl of mudwavesthe East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babenythe West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fallfrom Cut Hill through Wystman's Woodput your ear to it, you can hear watercooped up in moss and movingslowly uphill through lean-to treeswhere every day the sun gets twisted and shutwith the weak sound of the windrubbing one indolent twig upon another*when the lithe Water turnsand its tongue flatters the fernsdo you speak this kind of sound:whirlpool whisking round?*Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap. I saw two roe deer wandering through this morning. And then the wind's got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that've got no branches to give them balance. I generally leave the deadwood lying. They say all rivers were once fallen trees.*I can outcanoevre you*tufting felting hanks tops spindles slubbingshoppers and rollers and slatted beltsbales of carded wool the colour of limestoneand wool puffs flying through tubes distributed by cycloneswool in the back of the throat, wool on ledges,in fields and spinning at 5,000 rotations per minute —and look how quickly a worker can mend an endwhat tentacular fingers moving like a spider,splicing it invisibly neat look what fingers could be —*all day my voice is being washed away*if I shout out,if I shout in,I am only as wideas a word's aperture*a hesitation, a hiding-place*May the water buoy them up, may God grant themextraordinary lifejacket lightness. And this childwatching two salmon glooming through Boathouse Poolin water as high as heaven, spooked with yew treesand spokes of wetrot branches — Christ be therewatching him watching, walking on this river.*this is the thirst that streakshis throat and chips away at his bones*have you countervailed against decay?have you created for us a feeling of relative invulnerability?*They stood there like a flock of sleeping menwith heads tucked in, surrendering to the night.whose forms from shoulder height sank like a feather falls, not quitein full possession of their weight.There one dreamed bare clothed only in his wingsand one slept floating on his own reflectionwhose outline was a point without extension.At his wits' end to find the flickerings of his few names and bones and things,something stood shouting inarticulatedescriptions of a shape that came and wentall night under the soft malevolentrotating rain. and woke twice in a stateof ecstasy to hear his shoutsink like a feather falls, not quitein full possession of its weight.Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrinedin sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants,prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents,free-trading, changing, disembodied, blinddreamers of every kind;even corpses, creeping disconsolatewith tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears,still in their own small separate atmospheres,rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feetand lovers in mid-flightall sank like a feather falls, not quitein full possession of their weight.*have you forgotten the force that orders the world's fieldsand sets all cities in their sites, this nomadpulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,carrying everywhere her quarters?I'm in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.*It happened when oak trees were menwhen water was still water.*They wake among landshapes,the jut-ends of continentsforeign men with throats to slit;a stray rock full of cormorants.*A tree-line, a slip-lane, a sight-line, an eye-hole*like a ship the shape of flightor like the weight that keeps it upright*Feel this rain.The only light'sthe lichen tinselling the trees.And when it's gone, Flat Owersis ours. We mouth our joy.Oysters, out of sight of sound.A million rippledlife-masks of the river.*why is this jostling procession of waters,its many strands overclambering one another,so many word-marks, momentary tracesin wind-script of the world's voices,why is it so bragging and surrendering,love-making, spending, working and wandering,so stooping to look, so unstopping,so scraping and sharpening and smoothing and wrapping,why is it so sedulously clatteringso like a man mechanically mutteringso sighing, so endlessly seekingto hinge his fantasies to his speaking,all these scrambled and screw-like currentsand knotty altercations of torrents,why is this interweaving form as contiguously glidingas two sisters, so entwined, so dividing,so caught in this dialogue that keepswashing into the cracks of their lipsand spinning in the small hollowsof their ears and egosthis huge vascular structurewhy is this flickering waterwith its blinks and side-long lookswith its language of oaksand clicking of its slatey brookswhy is this river not ever able to leave until it's over?*two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,and each one can hear the wind-fractured closeness of the other.*he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewherelike a breath flutters its ghost across glass.*I've been brutalised into courage.*Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine. (hide spoiler)]
Dart is a long-form poem about a river. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. She wove their first-person voices into distinct characters whose edges blur throughout the section-less poem. She varies the form organically, according to which voice and character are speaking. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains.Oswald’s playful and expansive uses of language and metaphor, as well as her seamless blending of the mundane and transcendent, bring her characters and the river they speak of vividly to life. She blends the mundane with the transcendent, cramming in as many contradictions as possible without judgment. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. Dart is a wonderful synthesis of disciplines, a living organism, an interdisciplinary course in history, science, geography, myth, and poetry.
Do You like book Dart (2002)?
I don't carry many poetry books around to obsessively reread, but this small volume is a masterpiece -- and it actually fits in my purse. With language as sleek and unpredictable as the eels that inhabit the River Dart, Oswald traces in verse a river from its origin in a boggy spring to its arrival at the sea, and along the way narrates the lives of those who live and work alongside the river. It's a breathtaking piece of original narrative, epic poetry. A must-read for any poet interested in seeing how far poetry can take us.
—Rachel
(Ex Laureate)Poet and critic, Andrew Motion (who is SO boring to listen to), explores the connection between walking and writing about poems that follow paths, and the path here is the river Dart.Broadcast on:BBC Radio 3, 11:00pm Friday 8th January 2010Well, this programme has sparked in me a need to read the poem, and it has underlined just how bland Motion is as a person.Harsh, but fair!
—Bettie☯
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. It is about the English river of that name, and plugs conversation, anecdotes, and vivid, nearly spiritually scientific description, history and lore to raise the river to the level of a character, indeed the narrative’s protagonist—a feat hard to achieve; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, minus the humor, comes of course to mind. Form shifts with the river’s flow, formal, free verse, prose poem, and with the poem’s various speakers, also a shifting like currents, the landscape, time, and the river’s visitors and users. It is both beautiful and stimulating.
—Rick
