Dart
Alice Oswald gathers the voices of people along the River Dart and follows the river from source to sea in a book-length poem. Nature, labor, oral memory, and local history overlap in a rhythm that moves like water.
Work Information
A flowing long poem that weaves river voices, human voices, and the memory of place into one work.
By gathering the voices of people living along the River Dart, the poem turns a river into a sequence of voices and local histories. Memory, labor, and folklore meet in a rhythm that feels like speech and water at once.
Review Summaries
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Readers tend to praise the way voices accumulate along the river and the blend of speech and poem. Its short length is offset by density and by the way place emerges through sound.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2003-01-20
- Pages
- 48 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.5 x 0.4 x 19.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571218615
- ISBN-10
- 057121861X
- Price
- 5567 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Over a period 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, Oswald 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 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.
Reviews
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Dart is a wonderful long poem
Fascinating concept and fascinating poetry
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A beautiful book for an exquisite poem
It is so good to get such a well crafted piece of writing into a book form which feels and looks so good. Illustration on the front cover is perfect. I have already enticed some non-poetry readers to explore the work by giving this as a gift.
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it's Alice Oswald
that's all you need to know; her poetry is incredible.
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Elegant exploration of a river
I read Dart two years ago and purchased this copy as a gift. Through the voices of people whose lives touch upon a river, Oswald's poem brings a place and community to light in a subtle and generous way. I recommend it highly.
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river song
Does the music of language enchant you? How about good quality artwork, or sensitive, tasteful presentation? Yes: then this book is for you. Alice Oswald takes fragments of conversations from those who haunt the river, from its tinkling upper reaches, to the shadowy depths of the mature river. The 'song' is made up of a rich variety of individual viewpoints, whether they be walkers, fishermen or poachers, and they gradually build together into a 'patchwork quilt' of the river, whose own song runs as a steady chorus linking all the pieces together. The human actors are only one small part of the play, for all the wildlife actors, from dragonflies and kingfishers to otters and salmon, make their own contribution. Oswald manages to convey a richly visual picture with relatively sparse and unsensational prose, but the song which bubbles so bewitchingly out of these apparently ordinary ingredients reveals her total mastery of the medium. A deserved prize-winner, and a strongly recommended book to improve the quality of your life: simply open the first page, and let the words and illustrations take you on a trip downriver shot-through with magic.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 10 (2002) ・Winner