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. The human actors are only one small part of the play, for all the wildlife actors, from dragonflies and kingfishers to otters and salmon, make their own contribution. Like an actual river, it flows very smoothly and in unbroken fashion and drifts seamlessly from one aspect of the river's character to another, and has a graceful construction that has obviously been very carefully crafted. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea.

Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basra’s stinging first novel, is unlikely. 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. This is a communal writing, and there is a unique parallax of reading what are most certainly "someone else's words" being collated into new verse. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence").It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice. But anyway, today I am doing acid for the first time, and whilst waiting for the come up I read the whole thing. The same actors, though in quasi-fairytale territory, deliver a woodcutter’s down-to-earth description of his work interrupted by the sinisterly flirtatious questions of an unseen water nymph.

I walk under the rapid gravity filters, under the clarifier with the weight of all the water for the Torbay area going over me, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders. Dart is a very engaging and satisfying read, helped by a narrative flow that is more easily managed in a single poem than across a sequence or set of sequences. Dart isn't a flawless work by any means, but how long has it been since a NEW book-length poem has worked as well as this one does? Other minor technical and balance issues stilted its flow and undermined the value of the otherwise great idea of layering recorded voices and a watery soundscape with the words onstage. A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers , her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman.I think this approach was what kept me interested; I didn’t read it all aloud, but if I found myself getting tired it helped to imagine it being read out in my head, rather than just reading it.