Dart

Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded 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 in Dart 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 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. Read by the author, Dart by Alice Oswald - winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2012 - is a mesmerizing and stunningly original book, a poetic journey along the river Dart, the voice of the river interwoven with the voices of the people who live and work along its course.