And more current, from Alice Oswald's
Dart, a really marvelous book.
Dart is a long poem that features local speakers/characters along the river Dart – some living, some historical or mythical, some imagined – all interacting along the river’s path from source to sea. There are brief marginal notes to indicate where the voice changes; some bits are based on AO’s recordings of locals and provide an authentic element of oral history. I love this section – the finality, the reduction, the loss, the
sounds coupled to the underlying and permanent (quiet) silence:
John Edmunds, washed away 1840:
all day my voice is being washed away
out of a lapse in my throat
like after rain
little trails of soil-creep
loosen into streams
if I shout out,
if I shout in,
I am only as wide
as a word’s aperture
but listen! if you listen
I will move you a few known sounds
in a constant irregular pattern:
flocks of foxgloves spectating slightly bending . . .
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
and rolling me round, like a container
upturned and sounded through
and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty
seconds
.