Dart

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Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basra’s stinging first novel, is unlikely. Laura Marris’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude , Washington Square Review , Meridian , DMQ Review , The Brooklyn Rail , and elsewhere. According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water". I am from Devon and have spent my life growing up around the Dart and this makes my heart ache with those memories. But excerpting these lines is a little like taking a cup of water from a great river, both diminishing it and making it easily consumable.

British poet Alice Oswald begins her book-length poem Dart by asserting this comparison between the poet’s voice and the river’s. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids. A Māori custom is to introduce oneself using a ‘pepeha’ – in that you start by locating yourself in the world by naming your mountain (‘maunga’), your river (‘awa’) and your waka (the canoe by which you arrived in New Zealand). She wove their first-person voices into distinct characters whose edges blur throughout the section-less poem.

The one thing that I found slightly problematic in a way, is that because she knows the area and the river itself so well, and has such an intimate knowledge of every water-polished rock, overhanging branch and darting fish, I sometimes think maybe you need to have walked along the banks of this river yourself, to fully understand all the details she goes into, as it is a very in depth, almost analytical poem in some ways. There were tremendous successes on the actor’s parts to get into the spirit of each voice, but it was unfortunate that ultimately a feeling of diversity predominated. How long has it been since a more-or-less new book (it was first published in 2002) of poetry from a mainstream press has impressed me this much? The water is my only neighbourhood," Sean O'Brien wrote in Downriver, and there is scarcely a line of Dart that does not squelch with riverine ooze. I thought I would spend ten minutes reading a few poems and was surprised to discover 'Dart' was one long form poem spanning 48 pages.

I think this was such a great concept for a long-form poem and Oswald really brought the river and its inhabitants for life for me. Setting up "language" in relief to "water," the experience takes on the river's primal forces: flowing, nimble, refreshing, dangerous. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him. 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. 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.I like how she combines actual hard reality aspects of the natural environment with flourishes of imagination, and so it feels like a geography lesson, taught by a talented poet, which is pretty unique really. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. Soliloquies and dialogue between two actors were often outstanding, but wider group work perhaps needed greater cohesion. This is Proteus, whoever that is': David Wheatley finds Alice Oswald's river flows smoothly between Hughesian myth and Larkinesque realism, in Dart".

Dart frequently combines the two, moving in the same sentence from religious invocation to marketing jabber ("may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world's largest operational Sirofloc plant").Also Joycean, and Hopkinsesque, is Oswald's delight in the water music of the Dart's "foundry for sounds", "jabber of pidgin-river", and the springy Devonian of words like "bivvering", "slammicking" and "shrammed". 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. Alice Oswald interviewed and recorded people who lived and worked on the River Dart in England, and turned the stories into this poem.