Dart
by Alice Oswald
Summary
Dart is a single book length poem that follows the River Dart from its source on Dartmoor to the sea at Dartmouth, and its method had no real precedent in English poetry: Alice Oswald spent about three years recording conversations with the people who live and work on the river, the naturalist, the water bailiff, the sewage worker, the oyster gatherer, the canoeist, the seal watcher, even a mythical figure or two out of Dartmoor folklore, dead tin miners among the crowd, and wove their testimony into the poem itself, so that the river speaks in a relay of human voices while remaining, underneath them all, one continuous thing., documentary one moment, incantatory the next, prose giving way to song the way a river gives way to weir. Oswald trained as a classicist at Oxford and then as a gardener at Dartington Hall in Devon, and both trainings show, the Homeric machinery of voices and the working knowledge of mud, weather, and labor; her river is not scenery but an employer, a drowner, a god of the local kind. Jeanette Winterson, praising it on her website, called it a moving, changing poem, and its 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize announced a major and unclassifiable talent. What followed confirmed it: Memorial, her excavation of the Iliad's dead, Falling Awake and its Griffin Prize, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and a body of work in which, as one reviewer put it, her element is water. Dart remains the source, the book that made listening a form of composition.
Historical Context & Significance
Dart appeared in 2002 from Faber and won that year's T.S. Eliot Prize, and its influence has been unusually practical: the community sourced long poem, built from fieldwork and interview, became a recognized form in its wake, and river poems, river walks, and river choirs cite it as ancestor. Oswald's own career kept faith with its ethics; she withdrew a later book from the Eliot shortlist over the ethics of the prize's sponsorship, and accepted the Oxford professorship instead of the establishment's usual routes. The Dart itself, a modest Devon river, now carries a literary identity out of all proportion to its length, which is exactly what the poem argued rivers deserve, a voice of their own kept up by the people who live on them.