Terrain: Difficult going, only to be attempted in good weather; wear gaiters and good walking boots, walking poles are helpful, can be very boggy underfoot. The River Dart’s name is derived from an ancient word for ‘oak’, and on Day 2 particularly we pass through many oak woods. The East Dart Valley is one of the most inaccessible parts of Dartmoor and in many ways is the inner heart of the moor. The source, East Dart Head consists of a large bowl that drains a substantial part of high Dartmoor. There are three tributaries that join up and merge at the southern edge of the bowl to form the river. Mary Keen interview: 'people have accused me of being too traditional' ". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023. She has succeeded in finding a freshness of her own - and a playfulness. Take the serious tease of the title's 'etc'. She says: 'I love etc and dot dot dot. I feel the universe is constructed with an etc. I am really happy starting a sentence, it is finding an end that is difficult.' She is a sparing user of full stops. She has spent this year, as an experiment, writing prose, although it is 'not really prose'. She finds prose is sometimes 'better at detail'. In poetry, she is 'so seduced by sound'.

In the last in our series, Alice Oswald takes Madeleine Bunting for a walk along the river Dart and explains why, for her, water represents the complexity of putting an ever-changing landscape in to words I began to read it shortly after Christmas, during a train journey that cut through Somerset’s flooded countryside, where fields had been transformed into shimmering swamplands. It felt curiously apt. We cross over on the Dittisham Ferry to look at Agatha Christie’s house at Greenway (NT), the gardens are an absolute joy to walk around and they let Sam play Agatha’s piano (she had nearly become a concert pianist, but was apparently too overcome by nerves to perform in public). We have holidayed in Salcombe in South Devon pretty much every year for the last twenty. And bit by bit, as the boys have got older and stronger (and before I get older and weaker), we have walked further and further afield; once all the way to Plymouth (hugely lengthened by all the estuaries) and once up the Dart Estuary from Dartmouth to Totnes.

This book is a wonderful mix of poetry and prose using voices. The people of the river give it voices. The walker, the boatmen, the poachers, the workers in the dairy that uses the water, the ferryman, the workers in the woolen mill, the dry stone waller who selects the right shaped stones from out of the river. All these different people give the river a narrative. The words of those who use the river in so many different ways. Dart as a verb could not be more wrong, at least to describe the first moment I saw the river. There were buttercups and ancient trees and the river was dark and almost still. I walked from Alice Oswald's house through the Dartington Estate in Devon, following her directions, to meet the river that inspired the poem that made her name. Dart was a single poem that flowed through a book, 'a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea' made up of the voices of people who knew the river and her own. Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England. Stunning... Magic, the music of nature, the resurrection of the dead: all these things feel real when you read Alice Oswald. There’s a case to be made that she is our greatest living poet. On paper, at least, she fulfils the requirements, having won all the prizes you might reasonably expect a British poet at the height of her powers to win... Her intimacy with the land is one that resists romanticisation and gives her verse an idiosyncratic, getting-your-hands-dirty feel... Many of the poems in Falling Awake contain glimmers that feel snatched by the poet from life, from the British countryside at dawn... Duffy’s tenure as Poet Laureate ends in 2019. If there’s any justice in the poetry world, the title should be offered to this gardener-classicist who is bringing the British landscape to life in poetry again, making music out of death, invoking Greco-Roman ghosts and summoning rivers out of limestone' Telegraph

The right angle of the river we see on our way downstream just after the island is yet further evidence as to how much the direction and nature of the flow were reconfigured by the tinners in pursuit of their precious metal. I wondered whether the words came to her as she walked outside or whether she sided with Baudelaire, who claimed to derive his inspiration from the writing desk? Higgins, Charlotte (28 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and more – review". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 1 June 2012. Read about the Faber story, find out about our unique partnerships, and learn more about our publishing heritage, awards and present-day activity.

a b Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012.

I would very much like to tell the story of the Aongatete River onto which my home has a boundary and from which I draw my drinking water. I am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. 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 word for what we want and need is ‘kaitiakitanga’ – guardianship or stewardship to protect our precious river. From water-nymphs to sewage workers, Alice Oswald captures the voices of the river Dart (chambermaid, crabbers, dreamer, etc) . Each interview is transformed in the ceaseless, lapping flow of the narrative into an idiosyncratic form, a gem of language. Once, she had to carry a pane of glass for a greenhouse window and felt that only by meditating on it, through 'sheer concentration', would she keep it from shattering. This is how she felt holding her first baby, 'something more precious to me than anything I have ever known'.There are moment of such harmony that it’s breathtaking, as in the section where the millers discuss the ways in which they stretch and wind the wool as the river stretches and winds: “a two-ply, balanced twist, like the river.” In ‘Interview with the Wind’, published in The Guardian during May 2009, its speaker says, ‘I think of the Wind as the Earth’s voice muscle, / Very twisted and springy’. 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. As the path skirts around the industrial estate of Totnes, it feels decidedly less salubrious, but it’s worth it to make sure you come out at Totnes Bridge, so you can start at the bottom of the High St, walk all the way up and enjoy this cornucopia of independent shops and eating places to the full.