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. The poem, though, is marred by several typos: "put your eat [sic] to it, you can hear water" on page 10; "Japenese [sic] weddings. Alice Oswald spent several years talking to the people who frequented the river, before writing their "stories" as a poem, mixing free verse and prose in an amazing piece of literature that thrilled my soul. Dart is "old Devonian for oak", and Oswald underlines its sacred associations by mutating "Flamen Dialis", the priest of Zeus, into "Flumen Dialis", his river.

Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. Like the changes in voice and rhythm, the formatting of the poem changes regularly and in different ways; sometimes it changes suddenly, others it transitions smoothly. Like other good translations, the language of these voices does not obscure the original source it seeks to fashion into English. 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. I went to the library on my lunch break and got a few of the poetry collections on the reading list, including Dart by Alice Oswald.Oswald, who spent two years recording the conversations of people who live and work on the Dart, set out to transform the voice of the river into English through the way its familiars talk. The question of trusting a river brings us back to that personification of geography that is so familiar in poetry—brooks warbling sad music for disappointed lovers, for example, or leafy pools mirroring the memories of childhood. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.

A consequence of the casting was that almost exclusively female actors played the seductive, capricious spirits and embodiments of the water, and men their more level-headed victims. Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. 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.

Staging was minimal: sheets of compressed flotsam suspended in transparent plastic strung across the stage looked faintly baffling and ungainly at the start, but they came into their own whenever hit by soft lighting, recreating the impression of cloudy water. 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 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"). The river Dart forms the boundary between the counties of Devon and Cornwall in western England, and was somewhere I visited often in my childhood.