Dart

"Yes. It’s one poem, but in the Faber edition I have, it’s 48 pages long. Oswald can recite it by heart. She recites all of her work. She doesn’t read, she speaks, which is astonishing to see—an astonishing skill of memory. It’s amazing. As you say, different speakers occur throughout and they’re referenced sometimes on the righthand border of the page, but not always. It follows the river from its very slenderous beginnings out to the sea. The poem builds as the river builds and you see a whole landscape through the river; often the river is a prism through which things are seen. There’s an amazing line on page 22, where someone jumps in: “Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head.” That is just the most wonderful description of jumping into water: the way the light changes, you can feel it, you can hear it. Alice Oswald is an utter wonder for saying in a line what other people would take a whole volume to gesture towards. I love this book very much. It seems to be made of verbs and actions and thoughts. It’s incredibly kinetic as a book. Exciting, and physically alluring. You get a real physical response to a lot of what’s going on with this book; it feels really alive and wild. It’s incredibly visceral. John McPhee is very good at this as well. He wrote The Pine Barrens , which is a sort of cultural history of an area in New Jersey, perhaps not far from the book you’ve just described, this huge expanse of wilderness that’s still quite untouched. You know, I say untouched, but it’s got this whole amazing human history and wild history. Now, just because it’s abandoned, people think that it’s pristine. What does ‘pristine’ even mean? All of these terms are human constructions that we lay over landscapes that just are. But Oswald’s investigation of water and river and the course and the flow and the lyricism of that, the lyricism of the people who use the water and also the chatter of the water itself, the Dart, its voice and its tonality and its physicality runs through this book. “A lot of landscape writing is really a writer’s paean to place” One of the amazing things about Alice Oswald is that she manages to be the conduit for so much pure thought—both of the people that she speaks to and also the way that she interprets that. She is not a ventriloquist in that way. She doesn’t seem to put her own voice through the voices of other people. This seems like a kind of palimpsest book, a collage of found things, in the same way that when you see a river, you know that it has come from somewhere and it’s going somewhere, but it seems perfect, ongoing. It’s a thing in-and-of-itself at the moment you meet it. Like a person. It’s a testament to how much love she had for place. Because I think a lot of landscape writing is really a writer’s paean to place. A celebration of its specialness, its uniqueness through the prism of the writer, or the person who engaging with the landscape. This poem seems a really exciting way of going about telling a story through the voices of those who interact with this amazing natural feature, in an amazing part of the country."