Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with peo
ple who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices
as a sort of poetic census, she creates 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, swim
mers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowne
d voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.
