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Dart

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Dart

By: Alice Oswald
Narrated by: Alice Oswald
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About this listen

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.

©2002 Alice Oswald (P)2009 Faber Audio European Poetry World Literature

Critic Reviews

"If you never read poetry, make an exception for this." ( The Times)
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We struggle to categorise writing like this, I think - poetry is still treated like some unfortunate condition but Dart is a total gift and Alice Oswald a treasure of a writer. This will be a performance I return to again and again, I know. The language is full of music and close up history and intricate originality and nudging questions. Alice Oswald's performance is beautifully weighted - unforced and inclusive - the listener made to feel part of the journey and conversations. If you love words and the sound of them and the ideas they invite us to explore then Dart is wonderful territory. Loved loved loved.

A gift

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I enjoyed listening to this on a long drive, having the time to absorb the rhythmic, aural, polyphonic texture of this long poem. Not only could I see the landscape described, but I could hear it and feel it in the voices, language, and movement of each persona, and especially in the voice of the river, weaving as it does through everything. This is a work of poetry I'll return to often, I feel. Planning to listen with my son on the next drive.

Hypnotic and enduring in effect

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.