Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people along the length of the River Dart in Devon. Her poem ‘Dart’ is a polyphonic log of these voices, from a walker and chambermaid to fishermen and poachers to tin-miners and wool mill workers to a canoeist who drowned. We also hear the mystical forms of nymphs and ancient kings. It’s so much more than a poem: sociological research, documentary, creative non-fiction in vignette.
Here we have the ferryman near the mouth of the river as it approaches the sea: “Dartmouth and Kingsweir – / two worlds, like two foxes in a wood, / and each one can hear the wind-fractured / closeness of the other.”
The wind-fractured closeness of the other. Isn’t that beautiful?
We tend to see the other in almost exclusively human terms, but the other also exists in the nature around us. Oswald has said that she likes the “unfixity” of water, the impossibility of pinning it down to one time and place, “a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave.” A reminder that human life is ephemeral, however hard we try to tether ourselves to physical places.
One of the things that has horrified me most about moving back to the UK after a long time away is the state of our rivers. It is nothing short of a tragedy. Oswald wrote Dartin 2002. I wonder what condition the Dart is in now. I live in York, by the River Ouse, which is frequently pumped full of sewage. My granny lived in Hay-on-Wye. I swam in and canoed on the Wye all through my childhood; now it is full of algae blooms caused by phosphates from the shit of 20 million chickens farmed in its catchment.
Through my current work, I’ve met the brilliant writer Tom Bullough, who is currently recording the stories of more than a hundred people along the course of the Wye, from the Wales-England border to its source in the Cambrian Mountains. The result will be an installation that, much like Oswald’s Dart, “will represent multiple communities – their histories, hopes and concerns – but also, centrally, reflect upon the Wye itself: a river which, due to agricultural pollution and the impacts of climate change, has become infamous for its poor condition.” I’m so interested to see the work that he produces.
From Dart, Faber and Faber, 2002
A Personal Anthology 