Dart

Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in Dart a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Read by the author, Dart by Alice Oswald - winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2012 - is a mesmerizing and stunningly original book, a poetic journey along the river Dart, the voice of the river interwoven with the voices of the people who live and work along its course.

"In an age where "nature" poetry and spirituality are unfashionable, it is always exciting when someone does the job with panache and without being boring." GUARDIAN