Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2002
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.
'If you never read poetry, make an exception for this.' Jane Wheatley, The Times
'Alice Oswald is making a new kind of poetry... she is in the front rank of writers, in poetry and prose, who are not content to work only with what exists already.' Jeanette Winterson
'The wonderful Alice Oswald who, by rights, should be winning every prize going this year.' Carol Ann Duffy
