Isobel Dixon

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Biographical note:  Isobel Dixon was born in Umtata, South Africa, grew up in the Karoo region and studied in Stellenbosch, and then in Edinburgh, before the world of publishing lured her to work in London. She now lives in Cambridge. Her poetry has been widely published in South Africa, where she won the Sanlam Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize for her collection Weather Eye. Internationally, her work has been published in The Paris Review, Wasafiri, Avocado, The Guardian, London Magazine, and The Tall Lighthouse Review, among others, and has been translated into Dutch and Turkish. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including several of the British Council New Writing volumes, and she read on the first Oxfam Life Lines CD. She does regular readings around the country, often with a group of London-based poets, and has also participated in two group pamphlets Unfold and Ask for It by Name.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713967
ISBN:  9781844713967
Author:  Isobel Dixon
Title:  A Fold in the Map
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-07
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  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

Table of contents:
PLENTY
Plenty
Weather Eye
Christmas Beetles
Crossing
Amanzi
A View of Empire from a Train
The Skinning
Shaken from Her Sleep
Foreshadow
Certus Incertus
Gemini
Positano
(I Want) Something to Show for It
The Root of It
Kudu Watch
Strike Softly Away from the Body
Back in the Benighted Kingdom
She Comes Swimming
The Growing Gift
MEET MY FATHER
Meet My Father
Father
Long Distance
Tear
In the Wind
Listening to the Birds
My Father’s Pain
Lamb
Struggle
Singsong
Today’s Lesson
Withdrawal
Watch
Survivor
Drip
Cheynes-Stokes
And
Afternoon
One of the First Times After
The Paths of the Heavenly Bodies are Ordained
Old Child
After Grief
The Buried Butterfly
Again, or Dreams of My Father, Always Silent Now
Night Skirmishes
‘And the Hyacinth’s in Bloom — A Lovely Blue’

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Excerpt from book:  

Meet My Father

Meet my father, who refuses food —
pecks at it like a bird or not at all —
the beard disguising his thin cheeks.
This, for a man whose appetite was legend,
hoovering up the scraps his daughters couldn’t eat.

The dustbin man, we joked.
And here he is, trailing his fork
through food we’ve laboured to make soft,
delicious, sweet. Too salty, or too tough,
it tastes of nothing, makes him choke,
he keeps insisting, stubbornly.
In truth, the logic’s clear. His very life
is bitter and the spice it lacks is hope.
He wants to stop. Why do we keep on
spooning dust and ashes down his throat?

Unpublished endorsement :  Maybe there was something in the water in Umtata, but Isobel Dixon was born with the gift of lyricism as natural speech. A measure of her accomplishment is that all the sense impressions of Africa, even if the reader has never actually been there, live naturally in her poetry as if it were the only landscape. The vivid surroundings of her childhood got into her rhythms and her phrases. A second, perhaps sadder story, springs from that. She is looking back to something lost, even as she continues to engage in the history of the land where she was born. She has the language for her political situation, too, and for a third story, about her father’s death, she has the language of deep grief – a longing, beyond mere nostalgia, for both a childhood and a homeland. If the last vestiges of the old Empire have produced a new kind of exile, she is the way it speaks.

Clive James

Unpublished endorsement :  Fine, warm, sensuous poems which deal boldly with both the light and dark sides of family life and with the many manifestations and resonances of grief.

Kate Clanchy

Unpublished endorsement :  Isobel Dixon’s gift is to bring the same exactitude to the rendering of physical detail as she does to the awesome pit-face of human grief. The intimate details of her personal history are reported with congeniality and with admirable control. The huge gravitational presence of her father draws through every page and her vision of his death leaves her living half in a rainy Britain, half in her dusty homeland, praying for rain.

Tim Liardet

Review quote:  More understated but no less powerful than both of these collections [Sophie Hannah Pessimism for Beginners, Frances Leviston Public Dream] is Isobel Dixon's A Fold in the Map (Salt, £12.99), which includes a poignant retelling of her father's illness and decline. Dixon's own graceful style provides soothing contrast to the bewilderment and indignity her father suffers.

Natalie Whittle
FT Weekend Magazine

Previous review quote:  … 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

Previous review quote:  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

Previous review quote:  Poems that bring a sensual physicality together with lively, startling imagery.

Mail and Guardian, South Africa