RESULTS

Over a period of three years, Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, Oswald creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

The book is dedicated to the rake, an age-old implement which connects the earth to our hands, and the landscape with the sky. Alice Oswald has chosen poems which lie along the line of encounter between the personal and the natural world - from work poems at one end of the scale (songs for lowering anchors, or for cutting cotton) to metamorphic poems in which - at the other extreme - the human has crossed entirely over into non-human. In between, there are any number of portraits of the intermediate state in which most of us spend our lives. Including poems by William Barnes, John Clare, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid, John Ashbery and many others, this anthology engages restlessly with the many-centred energies of the natural world, variously reflecting Hopkins's intuition that 'million-fueled, nature's bonfire burns on'.

Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third book of poems, and follows on from the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem, 'Dart', which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. The poems in her new book compress this uniquely ruminative voice into a dazzlingly various sequence of lyrics about the natural order and the individual life within. Written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.