Dart

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It is about the English river of that name, and plugs conversation, anecdotes, and vivid, nearly spiritually scientific description, history and lore to raise the river to the level of a character, indeed the narrative’s protagonist—a feat hard to achieve; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, minus the humor, comes of course to mind. Beyond Totness bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they’re slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it’s to do with the river’s changes.

Oswald prefaces Dart with a list of people she's spoken to about the river, but despite this and marginal notes telling us who says what, "all voices should be read as the river's mutterings". Also Joycean, and Hopkinsesque, is Oswald's delight in the water music of the Dart's "foundry for sounds", "jabber of pidgin-river", and the springy Devonian of words like "bivvering", "slammicking" and "shrammed". Dart belongs to the tradition of British nature writing, poetry and prose, and shares much in common with an early twentieth century poet, Edward Thomas.People introduced along the way include "at least one mythical figure ("Jan Coo: his name means So-and-So of the Woods"), a naturalist, a fisherman and bailiff, dead tin miners, a forester, a water nymph, a canoeist, town boys, a swimmer, a water extractor, a dairy worker, a sewage worker, a stonewaller, a boat builder, a poacher, an oyster gatherer, a ferryman, a naval cadet, a river pilot and finally a seal watcher". The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence").

This could have reached a brilliant high-point in passionate physicality when a capsized canoeist captures the river’s deadly, seductive attention, but the beauty and spontaneity of dance which they aimed for in grappling with one another was not quite achieved.Dart is a very engaging and satisfying read, helped by a narrative flow that is more easily managed in a single poem than across a sequence or set of sequences. 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. The dialogue between the contrasting, even opposing, voices of science against art made for a conflict which was built up to be repeatedly dissolved. Told in the voice of the river, and it assumes the "voices" of various workers (some illegal), industry, recreationists, geology, fish, flora - and the dead, lives that the river has taken. 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.

After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry. Oswald's use of metre and rhythm is so evocative, as is her use of conversations and words drawn from those who live and work around the Dart. I don't often read or listen to poetry but I was drawn to this one as it is a portrait of Devon, a part of the country that fascinates me and where some of my partner's family live. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England.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. Like other good translations, the language of these voices does not obscure the original source it seeks to fashion into English. However, this is counterbalanced when the female head of the water-abstracting plant speaks of the challenges, importance and responsibility of her work.