Yesterday I got a copy of Spacecraft Voyager 1 New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald. During my not-long-before-bed reading time, I started in on the volume. I have to tell you she is fast becoming one of my favourite poets.

Here’s a poem from the “new” portion of the book.

In a tidal valley

flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
one among many moodswung creatures
that have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary

swans pitching your wings
in the reedy layby of a vacancy
where the house of the sea
can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

all you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
is both a barren mud-site and a speeded up garden
full of lake-offerings and slabs of light
which then unwills itself listen

all you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
all you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
skulking about and grabbing what you can

listen this is not the ordinary surface river
this is not river at all this is something
like a huge repeating mechanism
banging and banging the jetty

very hard to define, most close in kind
to the mighty angels of purgatory
who come solar-powered into darkness
using no other sails than their shining wings

yes this is the Moon this hurrying
muscular unsolid unstillness
this endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living

Frakkin brilliant. “Moodswung creatures”, the way she conflates identity with “all you flooded and stranded weeds” and my favourite – “where the house of the sea / can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour”.

That one kept me up for at least an additional hour. My mind would swim inside it, words came tumbling in on its waves, I had to get up and write them down to use later. It’s so simple really, fitting the metaphorical shift of what one can do in a human house to the non-human versions of living environments. Yet finding something like that connection that works as well as it does in Oswald’s poem is bloody difficult. I am delighted to have found her.

I write quite a bit of poetry about water, mostly two rivers, the Snake and the Columbia. I suspect they are some of my most obscure, perhaps most personal of poems and they are the ones (of course) that I like the best. They are always about  large time, and how our human issues appear in the face of that.

One of my sons died as an infant. The first “waters” poem I ever wrote looked at creation of what is now British Columbia, the waters that continually flow down from all the blocks of land being pushed in to create new mountains, new coast lands, and the death of a human infant.  How can one feel grief in the face of eons?

Anyway, I came across the poet Alice Oswald and her book length poem The Dart – about River Dart, if you didn’t know. Oh, such a poem!

The opening of the book reads:

This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.

Fabulous idea because rivers, and their wide beds (otherwise known as the earth) do have local “voices”. The Snake, for example, is vastly different than the lower Columbia, even with the dams messing with the flow.  And the region around the origin of the Snake and the Columbia—different as well. And of course the Snake flows into the Columbia, while the Columbia flows into the sea.

Anyway .. I think a lot about the unwelt of the river, as compared to the people who live, use and think about the river. Then there are the animals and plant worlds. They all co-exist creating the entirety of the world, even if we can’t appreciate it all. That’s the thing about having an unwelt, that it is the world that we perceive, and not the world that is.

Here’s a piece at the end of Oswald’s poem.

But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him You don’t know what you are till you’ve seen that

they start the boat, they climb
as if over the river's vertebrae
out of its body into the wings of the sea
rounding the Mew Stone, the last bone of the Dart
where the shag stands criticising the weather
and rolls of seals haul out and scrabble away
and the seal-watcher on his wave-ski
shouts and waves and slowly paddles out of sight. 

I steer my wave-ski into caves                                                          sealwatcher
horrible to enter alone
The fur, the hair, the fingernails, the bones. 

Flick out the torch, the only thread between down
   here and daylight
and count five while the sea suckles and settles.
Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine. 

At low water
I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff,
the tide slooshes me almost to the roof 

and float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to
   replace it. 

There the musky fishy genital smell
of things not yet actual: shivering impulses, shadows,
   propensities,
little amorous movements, quicksilver strainings and
   restrainings: 

each winter they gather here,
twenty seals in this room behind the sea, all swaddled
and tucked in fat, like the soul in its cylinder of flesh. 

With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft
   eyes, asking
who's this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy, 

all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave...

How awesome is that.

I’ve ordered another of her books (a new and collected). I do wonder what else she writes.