Dart
by Alice Oswald
This is a book to cherish. It is a long-ish poem, written about/as the River Dart, from the river’s beginnings as two separate sources along its course to the sea. The poem gives voice to people who live, work, play, and die in the river – but really, it gives voice to the river itself, its cascades and whirlpools, its currents and glinting waves, its history and its present. It’s the river as a home to fish and rocks, as a source of income, as a silty grave. As an element akin to time.
The poem flows like water – I found myself stopping and reading and re-reading passages aloud, just for the physical pleasure of the sounds and the flow. And – at the risk of sounding like a blurb – there are sections that are arresting. They stopped me in my reading track. For example, one of the narrators (a “dreamer”) picks up a flat, smooth slate stone and throws it in a clear straight arc into the river, where:
…it sank like a feather falls,
not in full possession of its weight. (page. 27)
How – as a writer, as an observer – do you come up with something like that? But there it is: a heavy stone, floating down to the bottom of a riverbed, its weight counteracted by the flows and currents of the river – rendering the stone more feather-like than stone-like, revealing the stone’s ostensibly strong hold on gravity to be as precarious as that of a feather, incomparably light, yet no more or less “in full possession of its weight” as it floats downward at the mercy of the of the upward currents.
There are also keen observations couched in more prosaic passages. Take the stonewaller, who compares being on the river to being “in a more wobbly element, like a wheelbarrow.” Again: arresting. Yes, being on water is wobbly, like being in a wheelbarrow. And are we allowed to say that a wheelbarrow is an element? I think so.
In a way, Dart is a set of enmeshed poems. One particularly clear example is a poem, written in quatrains, on how Brutus came to England:
It happened when oak trees were men
when water was still water.
There was a man, Trojan born,
a footpad, a fighter. (page 30)
It conjures up myth, Old English poetry, adventure – and pristine purity of water, filled with glittering, fishy life. It’s set apart by its stricter meter, but it flows directly from a passage in which the river’s water is involved in a sewage plant – which is anything but pristine but perhaps in some ways a consequence of civilization – and it ends with an image of the first person the Trojans encounter – a man carrying stones – which the segues into the stonewaller’s narrative, that man of the earth who seeks stones for building:
…You get this light different from anything on land, as if you’re keeping a different space, you’re in a more wobbly element, like a wheelbarrow, you can feel the whole earth tipping, the hills shifting up and down, shedding stones as if everything’s a kind of water… (page 34)
Dart, Alice Oswald, Faber & Faber, 2002.
