“A fragile wickerwork of floodbrash”

This strikingly visual noun phrase from Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Dart’ kept me company on my walk this morning. Nearly forty-eight hours into Storm Christoph, the river ran huge and fast and the ground oozed sponge-saturated beneath my wellies. The racing water dumped a ‘wickerwork’ of twig and branch debris at the base of trees and at curves of the river so that it seemed as if hundreds of giant birds’ nests had been washed from the sky. The ‘floodbrash’ also contained curious treasures: a cuff of pipe insulation, a tiny red toy tractor, several golf balls, a pair of lacy turquoise knickers and assorted plastic bottles. As I walked, Oswald’s repetition of the fricative ‘f’ allowed her phrase to run though my mind over and over again, its movement soothed by the alliterative ‘o’s and ‘a’s. And then the harsh jolt of ‘wickerwork’ with its sharp consonants ‘ck’ and ‘rk’ confirmed what my eyes told me: flood water is not to be trusted.

The hills of Cumbria were ice-carved by glaciers into peaks and valleys that drain water at great speed and in enormous volumes. After heavy rain or snow melt, the perspective of our immediate world changes: the river flows higher and wider in a torrent without neat banks. In spate, the river sounds closer, especially at night. This rush of water loosens poetry fragments into my consciousness in swirls that I find hard to express. Working with books makes it so easy to sound like a pretentious twerp and I keep these inner word ripples to myself as our regular dog walk becomes a watery adventure.

For Alice Oswald, the River Dart is a polyphonic character that is both mythic and historic. Her poem resonates with voices all along the river’s journey from source to sea so that the reader hears, amongst many others, a dairy worker, a canoeist, a forester, a water nymph and a stonewaller. As I pause to investigate pottery shards in the shallows, I remember the chilly symbolism of the River Lethe from my Classics lessons and Eliot’s rat infested ‘Sweet Thames’ of‘The Wasteland’. I am glad to carry the ‘cobbled water’ of R.S.Thomas’s ‘The River’ and the great joy of Ted Hughes’ ‘That Morning’ in which he and his son fish ‘alive in the river of light’. Hughes, the passionate fisherman, wrote water into so many of his poems as places, experiences, creatures and characters. More than any other poem though, I hear his ‘Go Fishing’ from the collection 'River’, published in 1983. Seamus Heaney read this poem at Hughes’ funeral and it is a remarkable evocation of an experience of ‘flow’ when we become so absorbed in a particular moment that we forget the demands of our wider lives:

Join water, wade into underbeing
Let brain mist into moist earth
Ghost loosen downstream
Gulp river and gravity

Lose words

Cease