The question of trusting a river brings us back to that personification of geography that is so familiar in poetry—brooks warbling sad music for disappointed lovers, for example, or leafy pools mirroring the memories of childhood. It is a beautiful part of England but harsh in different weather extremes; Oswald captures this perfectly through her poems and I got a real sense of place through listening. It is so good to get such a well crafted piece of writing into a book form which feels and looks so good.

Some poetry books contain a number of good poems, or give me something to think about, but Dart is one of the few poetry books that draws me from start to finish. 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 book is a journey along the Dart through the eyes and the jobs of the people that work it, use it and inhabit its shores, their voices combining to give it a narrative, a voice and a history. 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. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.In response to critics of environmentalist works of art who object that works of art "that focus on physical connection with a local environment" fall short, because they lack a globalized interconnectedness, he argues that "Oswald’s poem transcends the physical through its engagement with the river’s spiritual and mythological aspects". Here, and at many other points, there is delicately insinuated sexuality beneath the surface of exchanges.

Joyce's Anna Livia is careworn and weary by the time she reaches the sea, and the Dart exacts its human toll too, with its old river pilots groaning about their arthritis but unrepentant ("tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning").The individual actions and consequences that seem harmless when isolated become something else when multiplied. 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. 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.