Dart

Product Information

I think about those years of gardening every single day. It was the foundation of a different way of perceiving things. Instead of looking at landscape in a baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I became critical of any account that was not a working account.' a b Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. I usually struggle to read long pieces of poetry, and so I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this so much. Again, this came from my boyfriend – he had to read it for a module of his, and started reading it aloud while I was there. I think this approach was what kept me interested; I didn’t read it all aloud, but if I found myself getting tired it helped to imagine it being read out in my head, rather than just reading it. Focusing on the rhythms and beat of the piece not only helped me read it but I think it also adds to the feel of it – there are places with little rhythm and places with a clear beat; this is obviously intentional, and should be read as such. a b Waters, Florence (6 December 2011). "Poet withdraws from TS Eliot prize over sponsorship". The Telegraph. London: Telegraph Media Group Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012.

She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two - walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn't take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a 'non-verbal level'. She thinks 'a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting'. Only later comes the 'plastic art of finding the words'. We spent our last night in the Nelson suite of the Bayards Cove Inn, which has great views over the rooftops down to the estuary and the sea. This book is a wonderful mix of poetry and prose using voices. The people of the river give it voices. The walker, the boatmen, the poachers, the workers in the dairy that uses the water, the ferryman, the workers in the woolen mill, the dry stone waller who selects the right shaped stones from out of the river. All these different people give the river a narrative. The words of those who use the river in so many different ways. Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012.a b Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2011). "Memorial by Alice Oswald – review". The Observer. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. Dart is a book of poetry written by British poet Alice Oswald. It was published in 2002, and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.

A couple of kilometres south of here three tributaries join up to create a much more definable flow, and the day we walk here the exact spot is marked by a Dartmoor pony placidly grazing and its foal (cf. foal of a river). In all the time it takes us to reach where they are standing they don’t move an inch. Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead: “All vigorous men / All vanished”' Telegraph Sharrah Pool is a popular swimming spot, and the author was persuaded (by himself) to briefly go in. Interview with Alice Oswald Alice Oswald is a British poet who lives in Devon with her family. Newspaper profiles will inevitably mention the fact that after studying classics at Oxford she worked as a gardener. In fairness, her time working as a gardener was hugely important to her poetic development.As the path skirts around the industrial estate of Totnes, it feels decidedly less salubrious, but it’s worth it to make sure you come out at Totnes Bridge, so you can start at the bottom of the High St, walk all the way up and enjoy this cornucopia of independent shops and eating places to the full. For seven years, she worked as a gardener (her mother is garden designer and writer Mary Keen). Her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was written at a time when she was working eight-hour days in the garden. Is there an affinity between gardening and writing poetry?

This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads. She is eloquent about voicelessness. 'Lovesong for three children' ends with the lines: 'My voice, hanging in the/ belfry-emptiness of the throat,/ your two ropes swinging slightly.' And in 'Woods etc': 'In my throat, the little mercury line/ that regulates my speech began to fall/rapidly the endless length of my spine'. Our next stop is the East Dart Waterfall, a veritable beauty spot with an unusual curtain of water falling diagonally down a seven-foot drop, and then rushing over a series of large ledges to a pool below. Her second collection, ‘Dart’ (2002), combines verse and prose and tells the story of the River Dart from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a ‘… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference …’.The poem continues: ‘Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously / It inhales for a while and then describes by means of breath / Some kind of grief, what is it?’ The wind is finally envisioned as a ‘huge, hushed up, / Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister’, of whom it asks: ‘is she serious?’ One might call this charmingly enigmatic, and characteristic of Alice Oswald, a poet remarkable for her personifications of Nature, giving its many voices full play. She draws not only upon acute observations of birds, beasts, and flowers in landscapes, but also upon their topography, history, human inhabitants and spiritual dimensions. If this makes her work sound high-minded, it’s also delightfully eccentric, highly rhythmical – she often uses G.M. Hopkins’ sprung rhythms –and humanely sympathetic to her subjects. I would very much like to tell the story of the Aongatete River onto which my home has a boundary and from which I draw my drinking water. I am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. Some of our major rivers have been given the status of legal entity in the laws of the country and so I am fascinated to protect and tell the story of my own river. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river. Once, she had to carry a pane of glass for a greenhouse window and felt that only by meditating on it, through 'sheer concentration', would she keep it from shattering. This is how she felt holding her first baby, 'something more precious to me than anything I have ever known'. It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 Alice Oswald announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017.