Dart

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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 Collection). In ‘Interview with the Wind’, published in The Guardian during May 2009, its speaker says, ‘I think of the Wind as the Earth’s voice muscle, / Very twisted and springy’.

shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize, for Memorial, subsequently withdrawn due to Oswald's ethical concerns. [17] [18] [19] shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection), The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile [10]Oswald finds a match for Mr Bloom's descriptive rhapsodies in her water abstractor, verifying his calibration records and monitoring for "colour and turbidity". People are forever sifting the Dart or trying to harness its power: tin-extractors, millers washing their wool and making dyes, dairy workers using the water to cool their milk, not to mention its ecosystem of "round streamlined creatures born into vanishing". Oswald’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. Overall, I would recommend this collection. As with many collections, I feel like I would get more out of it upon a reread but on the whole this was a very enjoyable and atmospheric collection.

Earth Has Not Any Thing to Shew More Fair: A Bicentennial Celebration of Wordsworth's Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge (co-edited with Peter Oswald and Robert Woof), Shakespeare's Globe& The Wordsworth Trust, ISBN 1-870787-84-6

Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work which combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told 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 …' ( The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Dart is a book of poetry written by British poet Alice Oswald. It was published in 2002, and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. The narrative itself is a really interesting one. We aren’t physically transported along the river – that is to say, the reader is taken on the journey through the river by the different voices, going from walkers at the source of the river to crabbers and salmon fishers at the estuary, rather than the poem focusing on physical descriptions to show the river's progression. The only real complaint I have here is that I’d have liked to hear more of many of the voices; we only get snapshots of stories, many even cut off mid-sentence just as you get hooked – but I suppose the river flows through fast, and cutting stories off before they’re finished is one of the ways Oswald reflects this. The voices cut off and overlap, which can be jarring but is also incredibly effective. I would very much like to tell the story of the Aongatete River onto which my home has a boundary and from which I draw my drinking water. I am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. Some of our major rivers have been given the status of legal entity in the laws of the country and so I am fascinated to protect and tell the story of my own river. The word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river. Oswald, Alice (2011). Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 9780571274161. Archived from the original on 6 June 2012.

In 2009 she published both A sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.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. This is a heartening book for all sorts of reasons. Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism. Dart frequently combines the two, moving in the same sentence from religious invocation to marketing jabber ("may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world's largest operational Sirofloc plant"). She shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the avaliable range of tonal and thematic possibilities. She offers, in a word, what too much contemporary poetry forbids itself: ambition. 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’. Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap. I saw two roe deer wandering through this morning. 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. I generally leave the deadwood lying. They say all rivers were once fallen trees. Alice Oswald announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017.