Setting up "language" in relief to "water," the experience takes on the river's primal forces: flowing, nimble, refreshing, dangerous. 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 'song' is made up of a rich variety of individual viewpoints, whether they be walkers, fishermen or poachers, and they gradually build together into a 'patchwork quilt' of the river, whose own song runs as a steady chorus linking all the pieces together. But anyway, today I am doing acid for the first time, and whilst waiting for the come up I read the whole thing.

Here, and at many other points, there is delicately insinuated sexuality beneath the surface of exchanges. I saw flashes of truly moving lines, only to have it gulped up and sent downstream to make way for the mingling of facts, anecdotes, and roles. 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. 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. I've not read many poetry books like this one, where its just one huge, interconnected poem, and so that was a bit different for starters.However, this is counterbalanced when the female head of the water-abstracting plant speaks of the challenges, importance and responsibility of her work.

We glimpse history and place and identity all bubbling up and swirling together, reflecting sunlight, moonlight, "wind, wings, roots.I am no expert, I am learning, but I do love the connection between the people of the land (the ‘whenua’) and their mountain and river. 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. Soliloquies and dialogue between two actors were often outstanding, but wider group work perhaps needed greater cohesion. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Having said that, this collection completely evoked the mythical and eerie sense of Devon that brings the magic of the place to life. The water is my only neighbourhood," Sean O'Brien wrote in Downriver, and there is scarcely a line of Dart that does not squelch with riverine ooze.The lines and the rhythms of their speech have the syntax of the river in them—they stretch the boundaries of English sentences as they reach toward the speech of the Dart.