Dart

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But she likes to think that children help prevent her from getting 'too much in the head'. She adds: 'You have to remain practical and strong for them.' There is an extraordinary poem in the new collection 'Poem for Carrying a Baby out of Hospital', in which she is terrified by its fragility, fearful that she might drop it. Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England. Alice Oswald once claimed she was ‘not a nature poet, though I do write about the special nature of what happens to exist’ ( PBS Bulletin, Spring 1996). More than a decade on into her career, we can perhaps accept the poetic truth of this. She certainly is a special kind of poet – re-imagining Nature’s contemporary aspects in truly original ways. We became so enamoured by the Dart that we were determined to discover its source this year, way up on Dartmoor. And whilst researching its exact location, I came across this gem of a book, Alice Oswald’s ‘Dart’, which takes us down the river in a far more visceral way than any tourist fodder possibly could.

Earth Has Not Any Thing to Shew More Fair: A Bicentennial Celebration of Wordsworth's Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge (co-edited with Peter Oswald and Robert Woof), Shakespeare's Globe& The Wordsworth Trust, ISBN 1-870787-84-6 A wonderful book-length poem, with several voices in verse and prose very skillfully stitched together, "Slip-Shape," into a "songline from the source to the sea."

a b "Forward Arts Foundation Alumni". Archived from the original on 13 July 2019 . Retrieved 24 June 2019. She would certainly have been familiar with his intimacy with The Dart when she came to write her poem. She also compiled ‘A Ted Hughes Bestiary’ (2016), a compilation of his writing about animals real and invented.

I think about those years of gardening every single day. It was the foundation of a different way of perceiving things. Instead of looking at landscape in a baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I became critical of any account that was not a working account.'Her second collection, ‘Dart’ (2002), combines verse and prose and tells the story of the River Dart from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a ‘… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference …’. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth