Alice Oswald's book-length poem Dart (2002) is plainly a geographical poem. It is structured by the flow of the river Dart from its emergence at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, down through Two Bridges, Staverton, Buckfast and Totnes before it reaches the sea at Dartmouth; and, although it is written in a complex weave of voices, it is perfectly easy to see how its stages correspond to the river's progress on an Ordnance Survey map. But although Oswald herself calls it a ‘map poem’, its own kind of mapping is far more than a representation or description of people in given locations. Dart traces the river's flow through its human environment, the lives of the walkers, naturalists, tin-miners, canoeists, woodsmen, carpet-makers, poachers, milk-bottlers, sewage-farm workers and ferrymen who live on it and near it; people whom Oswald interviewed as she walked up and down the river, and from whose words she created the poem as a continuous interweaving current. As she put it in an interview:

Dart, in other words, makes a poem by using what Marcus Doel calls the ‘affective texturing’ of the river's space, the continual interaction of water and its setting with the language, needs, memories and imagination of the human social world. The poem's transitions are ‘geographical, not rational’, in Oswald's words, not just because its sections simply flow on from one another, but because her sense of what the ‘geographical’ means is not the rationalised, detached, framed ‘representations of space’ of economists and planners decried by Henri Lefebvre. Dart 's awareness of the landscape is shaped by the water itself, sensitive to the river's flow at multiple, simultaneous scales: the shivers of an impulse or a wave, the spinning threads at the Buckfast carpet factory, the inflows of tribes and groups in the river's settlements, and the aeons-old rock strata whose folds form the river's shape are all held together in its continual, sliding movement.