According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water". Alice Oswald interviewed and recorded people who lived and worked on the River Dart in England, and turned the stories into this poem.

Told in the voice of the river, and it assumes the "voices" of various workers (some illegal), industry, recreationists, geology, fish, flora - and the dead, lives that the river has taken. Oswald finds a match for Mr Bloom's descriptive rhapsodies in her water abstractor, verifying his calibration records and monitoring for "colour and turbidity". And then the wind's got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that've got no branches to give them balance. A consequence of the casting was that almost exclusively female actors played the seductive, capricious spirits and embodiments of the water, and men their more level-headed victims. Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap.The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence"). Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut… This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real work of the river. I like how she combines actual hard reality aspects of the natural environment with flourishes of imagination, and so it feels like a geography lesson, taught by a talented poet, which is pretty unique really. I think I’ve come up now, and the drug made me feel the poetry in a way I can’t quite describe, the sublime bits of being a body in a mass of roaring water, the interweaving of time and voices with the landscape, yes actually this poem makes a lot of sense now, my sober state was not receptive.

Form shifts with the river’s flow, formal, free verse, prose poem, and with the poem’s various speakers, also a shifting like currents, the landscape, time, and the river’s visitors and users. There is mention of the Dipper, a small bird that lives on the fast flowing rivers of Western Europe, dipping below the surface of the water to catch small insects and then standing on the stones mid-stream making its characteristic movement of bobbing up and down. This job title might seem fantastic, but is in fact quite real—the person who is in charge of extracting water and testing it for safe human consumption throughout the watershed. She asserts that the people living along the Dart who lend their speech to the book’s personas function as “life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters—linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea… These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. Some long poems can be challenging to read, but Dart is endlessly rewarding and gives back everything the reader puts into it tenfold.

Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. This was not helped by how scenes were divided by a momentary black-out rather than gliding into one another.