Rivers

Living near a river is a source of great renewing pleasure. Letting your eyes run along the lapping waves, water threading in and out, in and out, is to move your mind from the flux of its own consciousness to the flux of more eternal matters.

(To any of my tutees reading this, I recommend wandering down to the Thames every so often to calm the mind between revision sessions.)

Rivers have inspired innumerable passages of fine writing and even fine cinema. I could probably write a small book on rivers; but don’t worry I won’t bore you with my essay on how Renaissance river poetry documents the gradual transfer of power from court to the country’s active citizens. Instead I’ll concentrate on just two small works by my favourite living English poet Alice Oswald.

Dart (2004) is one of the most democratic English poems to have appeared in recent years. Oswald recorded conversations with people all along the river Dart. She then crafted a voice for the river which interacts with and channels phrases and statements from the recordings.

The book is a delight of mobile form and living scene. Rather than adopting a repeat form, she makes each segment’s form responsive to its content – quatrain; short-line; prose-poem; etcetera. The scenes dart from near its source – meet mythic boogeyman Jan Coo! – to bathers diving on their Sunday off – to the sewage-men and hardened crabbers at the estuary.

Her other book on a river is A Sleepwalk on the Severn. Whereas Dart is about the river in daytime, A Sleepwalk is subject to the moon. It’s a short work but captures an ethereal perspective on English life – starting with a dispute between an amateur birdwatcher and fisherman, and moving onto images such a  crowd rushing to see a moon so powerful that it shifts large tides on the river (“like the interstellar cold come suddenly into the world”).   It’s riveting, and surprising on a reread.

When I came to see her after a reading of Memorial, I asked Alice what she was working on next. She said: “A dictionary that undefines words.” Her answer was characteristically unexpected. It takes a very sceptical mind to undermine the very grounding of language in this way, in a manner as contrary to a lawyer’s work as can be. But on further thought her proposed dictionary is much like the river, removing the ground material that we take for granted and moving it in an unexpected direction.