‘The river’s mutterings’: Lyrical Discretion, Communal Utterances, and Poetry Beyond the Human in Alice Oswald’s Dart
Résumé
Alice Oswald’s Dart is a book-long exploration of the soundscape of the eponymous river in Devon. It blends the human and the non-human into what the preface describes as a ‘songline from the source to the sea’. Yet, in the poem’s sonic flow, the reader often loses track of any kind of source of the poetic voice and, despite its obvious allusion to the romantic tradition of nature poetry, the lyrical subject is characterized by discretion and a process of self-effacement in favour of ‘the river’s mutterings’. However, the model of the speaker-walker persists and informs the geographic conception and trajectory of the book. One is therefore left with a continuous sense of uncertainty as to who or what is speaking. This paper first proposes to read Dart in the light of this apparent paradox, before focusing on the relationship to memory and myth that persists in a poem characterized by movement and instability. I will then make a comparison between Dart and recent anthropological explorations beyond the human, in particular Eduardo Khon’s 2013 seminal study How Forests Think. Finally, I will suggest that Oswald’s interest in lyrical discretion in favour of collective or communal voices, could be related to a conception of the poem as a site-specific event.
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