Alice Oswald

While Alice Oswald’s most famous response to the ancient world is her acclaimed Memorial, in which she revisits Homer’s Iliad, much of her earlier work betrays her deep engagement with the classical world, reminding us of the fact that she holds a degree in Classics from Oxford. In particular, her book-length poem Dart (2002) is both an evocation of the Devonian landscape through which the river Dart travels and a biography of the river. Oswald borrows Ovid’s device of personifying rivers and allowing them their own voice or voices, while also drawing on a series of Ovidian myths in her depiction of the region. In her musings on the life of the river today, Oswald examines what impact global warming, pollution, and cheap labour might have on the river’s future.