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'All voices should be read as the river's mutterings': The Poetry of Alice Oswald
- The Cambridge Quarterly
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 46, Number 2, June 2017
- pp. 99-118
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay presents an account of Alice Oswald's first two collections of lyric poems, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and Woods etc., and her book-length river-poem Dart. The essay claims that Oswald is above all a Heraclitean and Ovidean poet, a poet concerned to disclose the place of metamorphosis and mimesis in all of life, and it concludes with a reading of Dart as a poem that traces the capacious conversation between the voices of a river (as it flows from source to sea) and the voices of the people living beside and working on the river.