Alice Oswald's long poem Dart

 Five or six years ago, The Telegraph asked its readers “Is Alice Oswald Our Greatest Living Poet?”

That was before she was named professor of poetry at Oxford, but I was already a fan. I’d read Dart and thought it was one of the best long poems of our time.

The Dart is a river in Devon. Oswald spent two years recording the voices of people along the river, from its source at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor to the sea.

If you read it, you’ll hear the voices of a doomed naval cadet, a naturalist, a boat builder, a crabber and many others. You’ll hear the voice of a greedy salmon poacher, explaining the temptation of a lad to set an illegal net:

            In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,

            in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.

And throughout the poem, you’ll hear the voice of the river and of those who love it:

            why is it so sedulously clattering

            so like a man mechanically muttering

            so sighing, so endlessly seeking

            to hinge his fantasies to his speaking. 

Raindrops from a big watershed flow sometimes gently, sometimes dangerously, into the dreamlike sea.

When I’m down and blue, the artistry of this poem restores me. It’s a work of genius, I think.

• Alice Oswald, Dart; London: Faber & Faber, 2002. If all this sounds familiar, I mentioned Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial on Memorial Day. And Dart was included in a list of one-night reads on Oct. 31, 2021.