Dart

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She trained as a classicist and was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 1994. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), includes poems reflecting her love of gardening and the entertaining long poem, 'The Men of Gotham'. This collection won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.

Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, Burke's Peerage, Ltd, 2003, p. 1987Oswald’s playful and expansive uses of language and metaphor, as well as her seamless blending of the mundane and transcendent, bring her characters and the river they speak of vividly to life. She blends the mundane with the transcendent, cramming in as many contradictions as possible without judgment. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth This is a book-length poem – a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey – about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters – Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes – who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. I really enjoyed this collection but I find it difficult to fully connect to poetry. Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life. It is a beautiful part of England but harsh in different weather extremes; Oswald captures this perfectly through her poems and I got a real sense of place through listening.

Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. We have holidayed in Salcombe in South Devon pretty much every year for the last twenty. And bit by bit, as the boys have got older and stronger (and before I get older and weaker), we have walked further and further afield; once all the way to Plymouth (hugely lengthened by all the estuaries) and once up the Dart Estuary from Dartmouth to Totnes. As a result of this cutting off and changing of rhythms, Oswald’s pacing is interesting and well done. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids. The way she uses language and formats the poem also adds to this in an unexpected way – this isn’t set out in one way. Like the changes in voice and rhythm, the formatting of the poem changes regularly and in different ways; sometimes it changes suddenly, others it transitions smoothly. She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two - walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn't take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a 'non-verbal level'. She thinks 'a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting'. Only later comes the 'plastic art of finding the words'.

a b Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012.

At the start of the book, Alice notes that the poem ‘is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch a series of characters — linking their voice into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margins where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.’ The first is my interest in my river and its place in native Māori stories. A Māori custom is to introduce oneself using a ‘pepeha’ – in that you start by locating yourself in the world by naming your mountain (‘maunga’), your river (‘awa’) and your waka (the canoe by which you arrived in New Zealand). After that you talk of ancestors by tribe and there are rules over the use of father’s or mother’s ancestry. I am no expert, I am learning, but I do love the connection between the people of the land (the ‘whenua’) and their mountain and river. It is at the heart of our attempts to restore our landscape and keep if free from pollution. 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.

In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial. Subtitled "An Excavation of the Iliad", [12] Memorial is based on the Iliad attributed to Homer, but departs from the narrative form of the Iliad to focus on, and so commemorate, the individual named characters whose deaths are mentioned in that poem. [13] [14] [15] Later in October 2011, Memorial was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, [16] but in December 2011, Oswald withdrew the book from the shortlist, [17] [18] citing concerns about the ethics of the prize's sponsors. [19] In 2013, Memorial won the Poetry Society’s Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for poetry in translation. [20] 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." She has succeeded in finding a freshness of her own - and a playfulness. Take the serious tease of the title's 'etc'. She says: 'I love etc and dot dot dot. I feel the universe is constructed with an etc. I am really happy starting a sentence, it is finding an end that is difficult.' She is a sparing user of full stops. She has spent this year, as an experiment, writing prose, although it is 'not really prose'. She finds prose is sometimes 'better at detail'. In poetry, she is 'so seduced by sound'. In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). Ted Hughes moved to the small village of North Tawton a few miles north of Dartmoor in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life. It has many landscape characteristics in common with his native Yorkshire, including the transitions from farmland to moorland, the powerful streams coming off the moor and their exploitation for power in the early Industrial Revolution. Although, as Alice Oswald observed, in Devon Ted Hughes wrote ‘clay-based poems, whereas previously they’ve been written on millstone grit.’(there’s a gardener talking)