Dart

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The poem is like a novel with multiple narrators, we get to experience the river from the view of lots of onlookers and observers, crab pot workers, sewage workers, wool dyers, walkers and tourists and this vast blend of different voices made it an engaging and flowing read. A wonderful book-length poem, with several voices in verse and prose very skillfully stitched together, "Slip-Shape," into a "songline from the source to the sea. For instance, at one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains. The reader is drawn in to the living history of the Dart, from myth and to the hard labour of those who work in sewage plants or as fishermen today.

She “abstracts” the river into poetry without sanitizing it, focusing instead on the humility that belongs in any human attempt to control or predict natural forces. By the end of the poem, it is the Dart speaking, but also everything in the ecosystem it has touched, a convergence of man-made effects, ancient stories, and natural phenomena.Any really good poet like Oswald shares some of his qualities—not letting her poems be reduced to easy symbols or rote thematic gestures. This was not helped by how scenes were divided by a momentary black-out rather than gliding into one another.

A delightful resolution was reached when the words of Theodore Schwenk, a real-life theoretician of the water’s sounds, were used to describe his science in arrestingly poetic terms, blending these seemingly opposed types of language. But excerpting these lines is a little like taking a cup of water from a great river, both diminishing it and making it easily consumable. This note gives just a glimpse of the complex labor of translation behind this work—one that surpasses the conventional personification of natural forms. 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.

She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river.

Laura Marris’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude , Washington Square Review , Meridian , DMQ Review , The Brooklyn Rail , and elsewhere. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. A wonderful lyric poem, evoking my favourite river, the Dart, and the countryside and people of Dartmoor. Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.The voices in the poem must not humanize the river too much, since those that identify with it too closely are in danger of being consumed. A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers , her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman. I am no expert, I am learning, but I do love the connection between the people of the land (the ‘whenua’) and their mountain and river. I am biased as so much of my early life was lived in Totnes on the Dart and this lovely flowing poem resonates with so many life experiences, from discovering sundews on the moor to celebratory dining in Dartmouth on my best friend's 80th birthday. The pre-show event ‘Dart Voices,’ in collaboration with the Oxford Poetry Society and with illuminating talks from director-adaptors Grace Linden and Alice Troy-Donovan, was effective way of building interest to see what theatre can bring to the performance of Dart that a reading of the poem cannot.