Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2011). "Memorial by Alice Oswald – review". The Observer. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. All too soon, the river meets the sea, but the stories don’t end there, instead bringing in the voices of dreamers, boat makers, naval cadets, salmon poachers, and, finally, the seal watcher. The perils of the sea rise up as salt and sweet water come together. There is also, in her poems, a sense of the silence behind every word. 'One of the differences between poetry and prose is that poetry is beyond words. Poetry is only there to frame the silence. There is silence between each verse and silence at the end.' Silence cannot be in generous supply, though, in a house with children? We cross over on the Dittisham Ferry to look at Agatha Christie’s house at Greenway (NT), the gardens are an absolute joy to walk around and they let Sam play Agatha’s piano (she had nearly become a concert pianist, but was apparently too overcome by nerves to perform in public). She is eloquent about voicelessness. 'Lovesong for three children' ends with the lines: 'My voice, hanging in the/ belfry-emptiness of the throat,/ your two ropes swinging slightly.' And in 'Woods etc': 'In my throat, the little mercury line/ that regulates my speech began to fall/rapidly the endless length of my spine'.

Herbert, Interview by Susannah (2 October 2012). "Alice Oswald, poet – portrait of the artist". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 13 March 2016. She went on to state that she wanted her next poems to reflect more complexity and open-endedness, ‘something baroque and growing, more like hawthorn’. This does look forward to the free-flowing poetry she develops triumphantly for Dart, with the imaginative focus switching from the garden to the river. It was inspired by the ‘mutterings’ of the River Dart in Devon, and was described by the author ( PBS Bulletin, 2002) as ‘a map poem or song line’ whose structure comes from the river, its transitions being geographical not rational. The documentary element is based on numerous interviews with people who live and work along the river, whose stories dissolve in and out of a plethora of voices – human, mythic, even industrial – and poetic forms. It has been most often compared to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, for its rhythmic and vocal complexity (though it isn’t a play and doesn’t have Thomas’ broad humour). Michael Longley, chair of the T.S. Eliot prize judges, aptly remarked that ‘its intermingling of poetry and prose feels natural, rhythmically inevitable’. 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] 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. Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon 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 … ". [11] Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.Alice Oswald elected as new Oxford Professor of Poetry". University of Oxford. 21 June 2019 . Retrieved 21 June 2019.

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. 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. Holland, Tom (17 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller / Memorial by Alice Oswald. Surfing the rip tide of all things Homeric". The New Statesman. London: New Statesman . Retrieved 1 June 2012. There are several examples of tinners’ huts and spoil heaps in this area and we pause to admire a ‘Beehive Hut’, built to store their tools and as a shelter. Oswald’s own words on the piece explain what she is trying to achieve incredibly well, and I would definitely suggest keeping them in mind if you decide to read this;This project has been brewing in my mind for some time now. Then I heard about this book, and how it had been an inspiration for Max Porter’s Lanny, which is a book that speaks loudly to me and which I love. So, there are the two elements in my journey to be holding a copy of Dart.

We spent our last night in the Nelson suite of the Bayards Cove Inn, which has great views over the rooftops down to the estuary and the sea. She read classics at New College, Oxford. Homer remains the writer who matters most to her. At 16, she was 'completely overwhelmed by the freshness. I had an absolute obsession with how you can recover that freshness. I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces'. The poem continues: ‘Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously / It inhales for a while and then describes by means of breath / Some kind of grief, what is it?’ The wind is finally envisioned as a ‘huge, hushed up, / Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister’, of whom it asks: ‘is she serious?’ One might call this charmingly enigmatic, and characteristic of Alice Oswald, a poet remarkable for her personifications of Nature, giving its many voices full play. She draws not only upon acute observations of birds, beasts, and flowers in landscapes, but also upon their topography, history, human inhabitants and spiritual dimensions. If this makes her work sound high-minded, it’s also delightfully eccentric, highly rhythmical – she often uses G.M. Hopkins’ sprung rhythms –and humanely sympathetic to her subjects. Following the journey of the river Dart from its source to the sea, Alice Oswald has woven a work of meandering voices that conjures up every person the water encounters on its way. 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.She says that the balance is 'precarious', that she writes with earplugs in, that everything is 'framed by chaos'. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water – fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid. The river becomes tidal at Totnes (‘the river meets the Sea at the foot of Totnes Weir’) and its character changes – rolling downs, much longer vistas, a sense that the sea cannot be far away. We have arrived, presumably, long after the water we saw arise at the source, but undoubtedly wiser about life than when we began.