From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. The river Dart forms the boundary between the counties of Devon and Cornwall in western England, and was somewhere I visited often in my childhood. He praised the poem as ambitious and said that Oswald "shows, post-New Generation, that wry ironies and streetwise demotic do not exhaust the available range of tonal and thematic possibilities". Heraclitus thought we couldn't step in the same river twice; Wordsworth saw in the river Duddon not flux but continuity, "what was, and is, and will abide". Oswald prefaces Dart with a list of people she's spoken to about the river, but despite this and marginal notes telling us who says what, "all voices should be read as the river's mutterings".

Hydrophilia wins out in Anna Livia Plurabelle, which Joyce told Arthur Power was "an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water", "the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of" the Liffey. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Carefully-chosen selections were performed rather than the poem in its entirety, and these were ideal for bringing out a particular, important theme within the broader backdrop of the whole work. Alice Oswald takes fragments of conversations from those who haunt the river, from its tinkling upper reaches, to the shadowy depths of the mature 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. 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.

This job title might seem fantastic, but is in fact quite real—the person who is in charge of extracting water and testing it for safe human consumption throughout the watershed. We peer briefly into the lives of those who live in the Dart and beside it, those who dream of it and around it, those who rely upon its ever-changing waters, the waters themselves. This makes its dramatic adaption by Grace Linden and Alice Troy-Donovan particularly welcome, the play running this week at Oxford’s Burton Taylor Studio. Soliloquies and dialogue between two actors were often outstanding, but wider group work perhaps needed greater cohesion. Alice Oswald spent several years talking to the people who frequented the river, before writing their "stories" as a poem, mixing free verse and prose in an amazing piece of literature that thrilled my soul.

Alice Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people all along the Dart river - their voices and the sound of the river infuse this book length poem, in which the reader is carried along by liquid song, bounced around, churned over, and ultimately moved by this beautiful, bright poem. The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence"). I think this was such a great concept for a long-form poem and Oswald really brought the river and its inhabitants for life for me. Dart isn't a flawless work by any means, but how long has it been since a NEW book-length poem has worked as well as this one does? I walk under the rapid gravity filters, under the clarifier with the weight of all the water for the Torbay area going over me, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders.

The book is a journey along the Dart through the eyes and the jobs of the people that work it, use it and inhabit its shores, their voices combining to give it a narrative, a voice and a history.I am from Devon and have spent my life growing up around the Dart and this makes my heart ache with those memories. Oswald’s playful and expansive uses of language and metaphor, as well as her seamless blending of the mundane and transcendent, bring her characters and the river they speak of vividly to life. Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. How long has it been since a more-or-less new book (it was first published in 2002) of poetry from a mainstream press has impressed me this much? The voices in the poem must not humanize the river too much, since those that identify with it too closely are in danger of being consumed.

Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. I usually struggle to read long pieces of poetry, and so I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this so much. It has a mouth, and a source, and down the length of its body the sounds it makes go through physical transformations, changing the tones of its voice. The same actors, though in quasi-fairytale territory, deliver a woodcutter’s down-to-earth description of his work interrupted by the sinisterly flirtatious questions of an unseen water nymph. The human actors are only one small part of the play, for all the wildlife actors, from dragonflies and kingfishers to otters and salmon, make their own contribution.

Like Wisdom Hely's sandwich-board men in Ulysses, Dart gives the alphabet human form when a swimmer spells out what she is doing by visualising her body as an S, W and M. I did not see them on the river Dart, but as soon as you mention the bird I am transported to exactly the sort of river on which they live – fast flowing and full of rocks.