Truly excellent, assiduous, and careful as a reflection of the lives along the Dart river.

This is part poem and part story about the River Dart from source to mouth.

Oswald had interwoven nature, people and history into the short and memorable little book. She skips from one type of writing to another from a paragraph on a kingfisher, to a few lines noting a bridge as the water flows past. You feel the pain as the water is polluted, and the tempo of the prose mimics the ebb and flow of the river.

I really liked the style of the book. It was brave to do a whole story / poem in one 46 page block. There are subtle side notes that clarify the prose, but do not intrude into the text. There is something about poets that give them the ability to create an images with such few words. Oswald has done it with this book, distilling all aspects of the river in to this tiny book.

**uni read - contemporary writing**
I found this poem to be incredibly beautiful, a number of the images depicted are stunning, and the utilisation of so many voices and the changing paces as though mirroring the rivers movements are incredibly clever. my only possible reason for complaint is that I wish some of those narratives came to actual conclusions rather than moving on to the next!

Dart is an accomplished narrative poem, a well-wrought, well-told story about the river Dart in southwest England. Oswald follows the length of the river, using the voices of different characters as metaphors for the river itself. In a short preface Oswald says that "All voices should be read as the river's mutterings."

The poem - unlike most rivers - stayed a bit too much within its banks. The river is recognizable as a too well-worn narrative of a certain historical moment in a certain place in time. There is very little tension between Dart as a river, a geological formation with an ice-age heritage that carries water drained from a watershed to the sea and Dart as an English river full of water nymphs, naturalists in khakis, swimmers down from school, and the stock commercial fisherman even appearing as a poacher.

Yet, there were also moments of reading with a big-joyful smile or the silence of recognition, the words and rhythm so evocative of a moment in my own life that the poem recast my memories and created new ones.

A recast memory, the archetypal English naturalist:

I let time go as slow as moss, I stand
and try to get the dragonflies to land
their gypsy-colored engines on my hand.

A new one, the dairy worker:

and all the latest equipment, all stainless steel so immaculate you can see your soul in it, in a hairnet, in white overalls and safety shoes.