Oswald gives voice to a river's many voices and makes it look easy. We peer briefly into the lives of those who live in the Dart and beside it, those who dream of it and around it, those who rely upon its ever-changing waters, the waters themselves. We glimpse history and place and identity all bubbling up and swirling together, reflecting sunlight, moonlight, "wind, wings, roots." I can only share a collection of my favorite lines gathered gulp by glass by gallon.

a b Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian. London: Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997. Earth Has Not Any Thing to Shew More Fair: A Bicentennial Celebration of Wordsworth's Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge (co-edited with Peter Oswald and Robert Woof), Shakespeare's Globe& The Wordsworth Trust, ISBN 1-870787-84-6 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. Oswald's delight in the liquid textures of language show how much she has absorbed from the most onomatopoeic of all writers, Joyce. As Tom Paulin has reminded us in a recent essay, water was always central to Joyce's aesthetic. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus is described as "distrusting aquacities of thought and language", while Mr Bloom is an inveterate "waterlover, drawer of water" and "watercarrier". Hydrophilia wins out in Anna Livia Plurabelle, which Joyce told Arthur Power was "an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water", "the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of" the Liffey. And not just the Liffey: he worked in Oswald's river too, when Anna Livia runs "like a lech to be off like a dart".Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, and 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 … ". [11] Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, her poem 'Dunt' won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).

Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald (née Keen; born 31 August 1966) is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. [1] [2] In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. [3] On 1 October 2019, she took up the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry. [4] Biography [ edit ] a b Waters, Florence (6 December 2011). "Poet withdraws from TS Eliot prize over sponsorship". The Telegraph. London: Telegraph Media Group Limited . Retrieved 13 February 2012. Tasja Dorkofikis (5 December 2013). "Poetry in translation – The Popescu Prize 2013". English PEN. Archived from the original on 17 February 2014 . Retrieved 7 December 2013. 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. S. Eliot Prize. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, Burke's Peerage, Ltd, 2003, p. 1987Judges for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Announced". 19 August 2015. Archived from the original on 5 March 2019 . Retrieved 19 August 2015. The poem continues: ‘Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously / It inhales for a while and then describes by means of breath / Some kind of grief, what is it?’ The wind is finally envisioned as a ‘huge, hushed up, / Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister’, of whom it asks: ‘is she serious?’ One might call this charmingly enigmatic, and characteristic of Alice Oswald, a poet remarkable for her personifications of Nature, giving its many voices full play. She draws not only upon acute observations of birds, beasts, and flowers in landscapes, but also upon their topography, history, human inhabitants and spiritual dimensions. If this makes her work sound high-minded, it’s also delightfully eccentric, highly rhythmical – she often uses G.M. Hopkins’ sprung rhythms –and humanely sympathetic to her subjects.