Mesmeric - Sunday Times. Oswald has soul in riverfuls - Guardian. Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in Dart a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. Alice Oswald read classics at Oxford, trained as a gardener and now lives in Devon with her husband and their two sons. Dart is her second collection. Her first, The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her most recent collection is Woods etcetera.