Dart

Over the past three years, Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic; they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker, a milk worker, a forester, swimmers, and canoeists. These voices are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices, and marginal notes that act as markers along the way.