Isobel Dixon – författare

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Bishop’s hawkweed, John Berryman’s hummingbirds, Ted Hughes’s burnt fox – the birds, beasts and flowers of Isobel Dixon’s new collection are at times kin to D.H. Lawrence, whose essay ‘Whistling of Birds’ lends this book its name, though each poem here is its own vivid testament to the natural world, and our often troubled and troubling place in it. Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, A Whistling of Birds is at times in conversation with Lawrence’s iconic collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers and makers – from the Venerable Bede to Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe to Glenn Gould, and a wealth of other connections closely examined and delicately drawn. With its resonant elegies and notes of celebration, this is a collection that flexes, hums and brims with energy, yet surely draws you in to its quiet, reflective heart.

Elizabeth Bishop''s hawkweed, John Berryman''s hummingbirds, Ted Hughes''s burnt fox – the birds, beasts and flowers of Isobel Dixon''s new collection are at times kin to D.H. Lawrence, whose essay ''Whistling of Birds'' lends this book its name, though each poem here is its own vivid testament to the natural world, and our often troubled and troubling place in it. Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, A Whistling of Birds is at times in conversation with Lawrence''s iconic collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers and makers – from the Venerable Bede to Emily Dickinson, Georgia O''Keeffe to Glenn Gould, and a wealth of other connections closely examined and delicately drawn. With its resonant elegies and notes of celebration, this is a collection that flexes, hums and brims with energy, yet surely draws you in to its quiet, reflective heart.