very small and damaged and quite dry
a Roman water nymph made of bone
tries to summon a river out of limestone

British poet Alice Oswald wrote Dunt: a poem for a dried up river after visiting a Gloucestershire museum and seeing a small carved figurine of a water nymph from Roman Britain, wrought in a time of drought as a supernatural aid to conjure water from a dry river bed. It is one of several poems by Oswald about water, about rivers. She says of the water nymph figurine, “I admire these extreme ways of invoking rain, just as I admire anyone who dares, by means of metaphor (and all language is rooted in metaphor), to communicate with something that isn’t human. If you’ve paid money for seeds or animals and you want to increase their worth by growing them on, then a water nymph is not some kind of a literary personification of water, nor is it a liquefaction of women, but it’s an effort, driven by absolute need, to make contact with something inscrutable.” I came across the poem about three years ago and was immediately struck by its internal music. It is full of pauses and stuttering repetition and it comes off the page as an exquisitely sonic work. Oswald’s masterful manipulation of pace seemed to force the poem into my body in a way that I had rarely experienced reading a poem. What do I mean by that? It’s perhaps best elucidated with an anecdote reported in the Guardian newspaper: Oswald gives regular recitations of her work and she’s quite a theatrical reader; at one event someone in the audience had an asthma attack because Oswald’s recitation was such that they forgot to breathe. (Fear not, I feel fairly sure my composition poses no threat to asthmatics.)