BIG READ: A songline from source to sea: a poetic journey along the river Dart

A famous poet would have nothing of my praise for his creativity when we met some years ago. Ours does not compare, he said, with say, music videos, like those of Bjork. In poetry a lone, often self-centred individual is responsible for 90% or so of the work — how can he/she outperform the dozens of creatives with state-of-the-art tech who work on videos?

Self-deprecating poets are nothing new, we have had apologia for poetry since the dawn of rhyming, the fare of Literature 101. Compared to music videos, poetry is also at the other side of the spectrum when it comes to ease of consumption. The hard work needed to even understand it, let alone enjoy it, has made it the least popular art form, as expressed in the title of US poet Ben Lerner’s infamous essay, The Hatred of Poetry, in which his own dismissive feelings about it features the most.

So when I bought Alice Oswald’s Dart, a book-length poem on the river in Devonshire, England, it was as a gift for my wife and fellow poet Corne Coetzee, and I wasn’t surprised when I just could not get into it, to use the current way of indicating one doesn’t like something. But such is Oswald’s reputation as a major poet, that I resolved to explore the river myself the next time I travelled to Britain, and see if that would help. And if one needs a book-length poem to understand something better.

We had the chance to do so earlier in 2023, and so I forced myself to put in the hard yards with the poem too. Well, to use the cliché indicating you finally got over yourself, something clicked and I was able to start appreciating what she had achieved with her project. Which basically was to spend two years interviewing people who worked on or lived near the river, from the wanderers on the Dartmoor at its source, to the remnants of piracy on the coast.

The end product sometimes is not very poetic, or even prosaic, sprinkled with footnotes and markers on the sideline to show who is voicing “the river’s mutterings”: a pilot, a naturalist, a ferryman, a drywaller, a rememberer ... But let’s present the conclusion from the start: yes, indeed, the poem tells you much, much more about this area of England, of what one might even call its ancient soul, Oswald herself dipping into the colonies for a word: “a songline from the source to the sea”.

What our journey juxtaposed with the poem taught me was the great divide between a contemporary England chasing the latest tech and globalised life and the off-the-radar ways and means of survival still tenaciously and fruitfully being practised and exploited as sources of significance and grounding.

The obligatory scamming by car rental agencies and the like that tourists have to undergo seemed to have moved up a notch since our last visit. New layers of technology have been added, with triple middlemen abusing your easily committed mistakes while multitasking at airports or shopping malls, or simply call centre bouncers — women are the most effective — to fleece your globalised credit cards of whatever they can. I stopped tallying the damage, but it came to about R3,000 in unreturned payments plus several days without transport — fortunately we budgeted for precisely this, since it is not a high price for peace of mind.

For the latter one also has to adopt Murphy’s philosophy to an escalating degree. While tech gives you pinpoint accuracy when finding the closest town to the Dart’s source, Okehampton, or tells you how to open the petrol cap, you have to psyche yourself up: wherever there is tech, it will malfunction at some point. You have to make it part of the adventure; having a car, it must be said, makes that so much more profitable.

Travelling from Plymouth, Google misunderstood and took us on the wrong highway. If that sounds biblical, the narrow road we took as a shortcut to get to the towns where the Dart opens into its estuary took us past one lush wood after another in-between the mammoth high hedges common to English country lanes (Oswald: “A green lane tiptoes secretly to the steep woods …”).

When hunger pangs remind one of a breakfast skipped, faulty tech brings opportunity for chatting up the locals. Sudden small shops around bends offer everything the stomach and even the heart may desire: cheap sandwiches, gourmet croissants, books, but then the coffee machine has no tea bags as advertised. An unapologetic lady cheerfully hints at the reason we pick up from other conversations too: the shop is run by three people who are trained in “swipe times”, meaning the speed with which they clear the queue at the till by way of four-sided bar codes is recorded and the data transmitted to the owners in Germany. Just-in-time industrial processes keep franchises supplied across continents, but since tea bags are not front of mind for Germans, the Poms have to plop a box beside the machine. And their supply not being informatised and so not affecting the three shop assistants’ bonuses, the ritual tends to lag.

The feeling of being monitored everywhere you go has become much more palpable in the five years since I had last been to Britain. And British acquiescence: the slightest misdemeanour elicits frowns and headshakes, also from millennials and Gen Zers. One dares not pull off the road; tales go around of breakdowns leading to people being run over because British motorists have unlearnt how to pause the steady streams of traffic even on two-way country roads. Then again, when you are allowed a roadside calamity, the response tends towards overkill with ambulances, flashing lights, staffers in multitudes of caps ... one fully expects a helicopter to arrive.

The alibi for all the tech does not seem to be ease and comfort anymore, the big word is “safety”. Oswald gives ample play to tech in the poem, devoting a page or two at a time to a dairy worker, a water abstractor, a sewerage manager, a modern-day forester all science and sensibility ... “and all the latest equipment, stainless steel so immaculate you can see your soul in it, in a hairnet, in white overalls and safety shoes”. Indeed, gently mocking she asks the abstractor at the purification plant: “Have you countervailed against decay? Have you created for us a feeling of relative invulnerability?”

From a casual remark in a sideline one learns that “Dart is old Devonian for oak”, and one can imagine that the state-of-the-art satellites above us will show gnarly roots perhaps millennia in the making reflected fractally in the twisting streams and bridges suggesting stents in arteries flowing into the river. Still, one can’t avoid an association with that strange British obsession that turned darts into a global sport and prime-time TV. It’s ... dare I say, vulgar.

The vulgarity of a commercialism that values the English pub as the summum bonum of civilisation gets close to spoiling everything along the Dart. We arrived after a few stormy days and so the ultra accurate weather forecasts brought everyone out to places such as Devon, and the greatest lure was the “English Riviera”. It is advertised ad nauseam by the question, Guess where you are? above a scene of a beach lined with palm trees. No! You’re not on Copacabana Beach, it’s our own Torbay.

After crawling in the traffic to the Devon seaside towns, we were forced to give up to make it to our next destination, where automated tech gave you only twenty minutes to take up an expensive parking spot for Greenway Estate, Agatha Christie’s erstwhile summer house. Later we were happy to have skipped Torbay, after reading the laments about abandoned establishments falling into ruin, criminal gangs taking over and the beaches being overrun by doped-up pupils and students indulging in the latest fads for bombastic parties with garish strobe lights.

Here the poem is incomparable, talking of oyster gatherers, ferrymen, boat builders and the best of all: the seal watcher. Part scientist, part protector and rescuer, they monitor and watch over the creatures by swimming into their winter hideouts, “where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace it”, a process repeated with a new soliloquy from the anonymous water every time, “driving my many selves from cave to cave”.

Another high point is the descriptions of the different waters from the estuary and the sea mixing it up, “all these scrambled and screw-like currents / and knotty altercations of torrents / two sisters ... so caught in this dialogue that keeps / washing into the cracks of their lips”.

Greenway Estate was well worth the visit, not for veneration of the Queen of Crime, but the National Trust garden. Though showing signs of neglect, it allows a wonderful hike to the boathouse, the scene of one of her 66 novels and then there is the magnificent collection of gigantic trees from all over the world overlooking the Dart. Equally fascinating is the role it played as an officers mess during the secret exercises for the invasion of Normandy in World War 2. Military activities were recorded in paintings on the lounge’s walls by a bored and talented American, aided stylistically by the only paint available having been various greys and blues for the camouflaged hulls of the landing fleet.

For the rest it is the usual display of aristocratic wealth and entitlement, from the rows of servants’s bells and archeological specimens to the dozens of deck chairs in expectation of visitors unencumbered by jobs or schedules. Wealth and free time also speak from the dozens of groomed volunteers who have to act like emaciated orphans, their bold Oliver to your stingy Scrooge, as they try to elicit donations for the National Trust, which so ably keeps the public pretences of the upper classes alive.

There is an universalism to marketing for tourism: this is Britain, it says, and this what you need to enjoy the British idea, which is what all people on earth should aspire to when they go on holiday. The economic aspects are very much part of the message, as are the cultural icons and the history, and the triumph of human goodness: when the soldiers on Normandy’s beaches invaded the rest of the world with democracy. The Beatles said they were more popular than Christ, and at 2-billion books and counting the same could almost be said of the Christie counterpart, Agatha — who brings together the iconic and the historical on the banks of the Dart.

Part of poetry is also what the work doesn’t reveal, a subconscious that can be politicised, and Oswald avoids Greenway Estate altogether — even on World War 2 there is a single reference when a pilot tells of the ship his dad brought out to sea which soon after got bombed; Oswald neglects to say by who but it wasn’t the Japanese. On the one hand, there is little that a poet can add to what has been scrutinised in dozens of books, thousands of brochures and untold internet entries. On the other, the enormous flows of money bring death by suffocation to the free word, which in written form can only still be found in poetry.

In fact, in contrast to the display of wealth at Greenway, there are a number of references to survival and even hunger in the poem. “Some days we don’t catch anything / don’t catch, don’t eat / Me and my dog went six weeks without food last winter”. Poaching is a proud tradition, “with a legal right hand and a rogue left hand”, which means they’re all lefties. But it is dangerous stuff, nets get caught by buoys snapping lines that sizzle across the water, frantic salmon torpedo the nets right out of the hands holding them down in the mud ... even the oyster gatherers can overload their boats and drown in the dark.

 The competition can get fierce, “we have been known to get a bit fisticuffs / boats have been sunk / nets set afire”. Territory is jealously guarded, to the extent that the outsiders are regarded as the criminals. “And if you find a poacher’s net, you just get out your pocket knife and shred it like you were ripping its guts.”

Oswald gives voice to the many victims of the river, their memory fading in dark tales told in pubs and around campfires. Washed away in 1840 at Staverton Ford John Edmunds’ name has survived, ironically, because he drowned. Now he struggles against oblivion anew: “All day my voice is washed away by a lapse in my throat”, but through Oswald gains some more time in language reminiscent of a GM Hopkins or Seamus Heaney: “O I wish I was slammicking home / in wet clothes, shrammed with cold and bivvering but / this is my voice / under the spickety leaves / under the knee-nappered trees / rustling in its cubby holes.”

Naturally, based on oft-told tales, there is much fun and games, which Oswald quotes almost verbatim sometimes. The said rival poachers have to contend with bailiffs, and one recounts how at Newbridge abbey a monk once gave him his suitcase to hide an enormous salmon from an approaching official. Another reveals how they get rid of rivals, by going into the bushes and “making bailiff noises”. Hilarious is the sea cadet: “I’ve been brutalised into courage. You could fire me from a frigate and ... I’d hit the target standing at attention.”

Totness with its photogenic boats and yachts moored beyond the weir from where the water is no longer salted by the sea, is the inland tourist hotspot and a leafy street hosts the dozens of little shops you can find in so many gentrified medieval centres of towns. They are the same olde shoppes you find across the world, though it must be said in our Amazonic times there are so many brands in the UK that you actually begin to believe there can be something like a free consumer unrestricted to a limited range of choices.

Totness showcases another discovery for the 2020s. Country towns seemed to have grown larger, acquiring new suburbs and new hubs. Ignoring the tourists, the locals seemed to busily have their own culture going albeit expressed in a fad of amateurish yet elephantine mock-ups of animals from across the empire proudly displayed in gardens.

We overnighted at Buckfastleigh cathedral with its magnificent abbey and Mozart concerts where the chambermaid walked straight out of the poem: “Please do not leave toenails under the rugs,” Oswald quotes her, “squirting, bleaching and rubbergloving everything away”. To our horror we discovered that Dartmoor National Park would be closed the next day, which we had set aside for it. Another reality: more and more boundaries in space-time settling over Britain as the commons shrink.

But from previous visits and perusing the 192,189 photos offered by Google Maps, we could enjoy it vicariously, remembering the horses taken for jaunts near the Dartmoor prison and the vast empty expanses. Oswald chose to start the poem at the source of the East Dart, perhaps to avoid the superfluity of the many prisoner and warden stories had she used the West Dart, though the river and its canals do feed their vegetable gardens.

The source is 12km from the nearest road and the first voice in the poem is that of a walker, with “tent, torch, chocolate and not much else”. The swampy spots are “like walking on the bottom of the lake” and he keeps “pulling the distance around his shoulders” and sometimes sits clasping his knees watching black slugs, while “he makes up a den of his smells and thoughts”.

I doubt whether Oswald intended anything like the picture that formed in my mind of the many vagrants we saw seeking out something similar on Devon’s town squares, politically correct in their diversity. They sit downcast, studiously ignoring us and each other, phones plugged in ears their lifelines to the free internet and the world.