'All voices should be read as the river's mutterings': The Poetry of Alice Oswald

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 booklength 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.