Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one's native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father's final painful journey.
In the first part of the collection, Plenty - "before the fold" - the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book's second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad - a father's illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.
"A fold in the map" is a nod to Jan Morris's Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere, where the traveller's state of in-between-ness is explored. Robert Frost said "a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a home-sickness, a love-sickness" and in these poems of love and longing for home, family, and other loved ones, Isobel Dixon draws on a rich store of natural imagery, illuminating the ordinary at times with a touch of wry humour. Her vivid poems will speak memorably to travellers, lovers and all those who mourn.
Praise for Weather Eye:
`Isobel Dixon portrays people and places, and a sense of displacement, in sensuous yet meticulous detail. In these poems she celebrates creatures and landscapes in contrasting climates and cultures, her sharp perceptions invested with yearning and humour - and an aura of wonder.' - Stewart Conn
`Poems that bring a sensual physicality together with lively, startling imagery.' - Mail and Guardian, South Africa.
`...a contemporary, accessible lyricism. ... characterised by sensuous natural imagery ... Dixon's gift is in the presentation of such a palpable, earthy presence and its accordant pathos of memory or displacement.' - James Tink, PN Review
In The Tempest Prognosticator leeches warn of storms, whales blunder up the Thames, beetles tap out their courtship rituals, and women fall for deft cocktail makers and melancholy apes. With her keen eye and a gift for vividly capturing the natural world, Isobel Dixon entices the reader on a journey where the familiar is not always as it seems at first, where the sideways glance, the double take, yields rich rewards. From Crusoe to Psycho, Pink Floyd to Fred Astaire, the human zoo’s at play here too, in a collection filled with ‘miracle and wonder’, wit and bite.