a b "2013 Popescu Prize". The Poetry Society. Archived from the original on 1 August 2015 . Retrieved 18 August 2021. 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.

Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. 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. 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. 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 announced as BBC Radio 4's new Poet-in-Residence". BBC Media Centre. 22 September 2017 . Retrieved 25 September 2017.

Sign Up to the Newsletter

In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, her poem 'Dunt' won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem). a b "Forward Arts Foundation Alumni". Archived from the original on 13 July 2019 . Retrieved 24 June 2019. a b Waters, Florence (6 December 2011). "Poet withdraws from TS Eliot prize over sponsorship". The Telegraph. London: Telegraph Media Group Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. As a result of this cutting off and changing of rhythms, Oswald’s pacing is interesting and well done. Again, this reflects the river; some parts as slower, as the river may slow down, others fast paced, like rapids. The way she uses language and formats the poem also adds to this in an unexpected way – this isn’t set out in one way. Like the changes in voice and rhythm, the formatting of the poem changes regularly and in different ways; sometimes it changes suddenly, others it transitions smoothly.

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.

Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald (née Keen; born 31 August 1966) is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. [1] [2] In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. [3] On 1 October 2019, she took up the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry. [4] Biography [ edit ] 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". Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which 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... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. 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]