''Dart'' is a book of poetry written by British poet Alice Oswald. It was published in 2002 and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.

Content

''Dart'' consists of one long poem about the

River Dart The River Dart is a river in Devon, England, that source (river), rises high on Dartmoor and flows for to the sea at Dartmouth, Devon, Dartmouth. Name Most hydronyms in England derive from the Common Brittonic, Brythonic language (from which ...

Devon Devon ( ; historically also known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel to the north, Somerset and Dorset to the east, the English Channel to the south, and Cornwall to the west ...

, England. It combines prose and poetry. Oswald is a gardener at

Dartington Hall Dartington Hall in Dartington, near Totnes, Devon, England, is an historic house and country estate of dating from medieval times. The group of late 14th century buildings are Grade I listed; described in Pevsner's Buildings of England as ...

, an estate in South Devon. She spent three years recording her conversations with people who live and work on the river; the poem is her homage to them and to the river. The river, she said, has a "frightening female presence...she seemed female from the people I talked to". Like the river, the poem starts on

Dartmoor Dartmoor is an upland area in southern Devon, South West England. The moorland and surrounding land has been protected by National Park status since 1951. Dartmoor National Park covers . The granite that forms the uplands dates from the Carb ...

, and ends at Dartmouth, in the sea. 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".

Reception

Jeanette Winterson Jeanette Winterson (born 27 August 1959) is an English author. Her first book, '' Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'', was a semi-autobiographical novel about a lesbian growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Other novels explore gender ...

praised the poem on her website, saying "This moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep, is a celebration of difference – the great variety of the natural world, and the escapes of the human spirit". David Wheatley said it was a "heartening book", and that "Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism". He praised the poem as ambitious and said that Oswald "shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the available range of tonal and thematic possibilities". The poem has been studied by ecocritics; Rowan Middleton, who published a lengthy article on the poem in ''Green Letters'', a journal of ecocriticism, saw aspects of

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...

bricolage In the arts, ''bricolage'' (French language, French for "DIY" or "do-it-yourself projects"; ) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media. The t ...

in the poem. In response to critics of environmentalist works of art who object that works of art "that focus on physical connection with a local environment" fall short, because they lack a globalized interconnectedness, he argues that "Oswald’s poem transcends the physical through its engagement with the river’s spiritual and mythological aspects".

References

{{reflist 2002 poetry books British poetry collections T. S. Eliot Prize–winning works