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. The lines and the rhythms of their speech have the syntax of the river in them—they stretch the boundaries of English sentences as they reach toward the speech of the Dart. 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".

By the end of the poem, it is the Dart speaking, but also everything in the ecosystem it has touched, a convergence of man-made effects, ancient stories, and natural phenomena. Instead, it was an aid to the imagination for certain aspects of it, highlighting strands of meaning that can easily go unnoticed. David Wheatley said it was a "heartening book", and that "Oswald shows that poetry need not choose between Hughesian deep myth and Larkinesque social realism". 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 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"). According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water".

A deserved prize-winner, and a strongly recommended book to improve the quality of your life: simply open the first page, and let the words and illustrations take you on a trip downriver shot-through with magic. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. Even the roles of the speakers (naturalist, river nymph, poacher, fisherman) are noted in the margins as they shift, creating small eddies where the larger course of the poem turns. I am, just as the Māori of the past, invested in the health of the water for my (and my family’s) life and well being. Staging was minimal: sheets of compressed flotsam suspended in transparent plastic strung across the stage looked faintly baffling and ungainly at the start, but they came into their own whenever hit by soft lighting, recreating the impression of cloudy water.The linking of the environment with the people who needed it for survival and how the river has interacted with people through space, time and literature was also interesting.