Isobel Dixon

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Biographical note:  Isobel Dixon has been described by Clive James as being ‘born with the gift of lyricism as natural speech’ and by J M Coetzee as ‘a poet confident in her mastery of her medium.’ Her poems have appeared in publications like The Paris Review, The Guardian, Penguin’s Poems for Love and The Forward Book of Poetry. Salt published A Fold in the Map in 2007. www.isobeldixon.com

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718252
ISBN:  9781844718252
Author:  Isobel Dixon
Title:  The Tempest Prognosticator
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-11
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World
Not for sale:  ZA

Short description/annotation:  Isobel Dixon shows great accessible range with this refreshing, exhilarating collection. Quirky poems about nature, striking poems about facets of the feminine self and playful explorations of art, music, and invention will delight readers.

Main description:  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 Cape Town to Nagasaki, the Congo to the Karoo, creatures real and surreal flit, and peck and spin fantastic webs across the page. In this finely-spun collection real-life explorers Robert Byron and Mary Kingsley have encounters both dangerous and humorous, we venture inside Alfred Hitchcock’s ominous Psycho house, and find Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked on the moon. Desire and loss are refracted through the writings of naturalist-poet Eugene Marais and Shakespeare, through the art of Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois and Henri Rousseau, through Pink Floyd’s music and Fred Astaire’s footwork, and with each page of this ‘ingenious carousel’ a poet’s vision of a world of art and nature emerges — stormy, celebratory, revelatory. This is a collection filled with ‘miracle and wonder’, wit and bite, a generous feast of words.

Table of contents:
Contents
Vision
Into the Wild
The Parliament of Gulls
Mountain War Time
Postcard from the Colonies
Upupa Epops
The Inopportune Baboon
Toktokkie
Startling Point
Root Verses
The Deserted Patisserie
You, Me and the Orang-utan
A Beautifully Constructed Cocktail
A Mess of Vinegar
So Many Henries
The Whiteness of the Whale
The Merry Jesters
The Only Brunette on the Beach
Requiem
Mall Shoal
Only Adapt
Capricorn
Robinson in Space
Astronomy Sonnetry
O Dreamland
Peacocks in the Boar Garden
Struzzi
The Poor Wild Boar Who Went Too Far
Paradox
Silking the Spider
First Faints
Love is a Shadow
Contract
Housewifery
Familiar
Agama Atra
valentine
Moth Storm
Good Company
Days of Miracle and Wonder
Usury
Vase
Trappings
King Kong Déjà vu
Beetle, Fish & Fetish
Every Valley Shall Be Exalted
The Tempest Prognosticator
Notes
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Robinson in Space

Which Robinson is this, adrift
on the far Sea of Tranquillity,
yearning for a cast-off world,
with an eye out for the new?

What Wave of Force and Swiftness
washed you here, to a pockmarked shore,
in the company of famous men,
a dusty scattering of names?

Let me set my print on this powdered
crust, small-soled, for you to find.
Forget your Vogel, Parrot,
Dove and Wolf, Keldysh and Cuvier:

I’m named again, your dark girl Friday,
with a wandering inclination
like your own. A comrade to explore
the Ocean of Storms, the Sea of Rains,

the eastern Bay of Dew, the near and far
side of your luminescent island home,
with its lost Mare Desiderii,
the deep Sea of Fecundity.

Born to be our own Destroyers
how could we resist such journeyings?
You’ve seen the missions come and go,
saw Clementine pass, rumouring

water at the poles. Could I tempt you
then with my craft, to leap at perigee,
leave this cool marooning, lure you back
to the warm embrace of earth,

the scrappy mass of England,
and your distant pinprick York?
Or, since today we seek
what tomorrow we will shun,

will you find yourself, as Selkirk
did before, enclosed, at odds
with your deliverance: a man
encamped outside himself,

tent quickly struck, as sails are set,
your heart a tabernacle for the moon.

Unpublished endorsement:  In this virtuoso collection, the work of a poet confident in her mastery of her medium, Isobel Dixon moves easily from dialogues with the animal world to mordant ventriloquizings of the female self.

J M Coetzee

Unpublished endorsement:  Isobel Dixon’s poetry possesses exquisite vigour, panache and a resourceful, ranging intelligence. Like the title poem, The Tempest Prognosticator is an ‘ingenious carousel’ of a book. Life-affirming, funny, almost liquid in the movement of language, yet the book shifts with such apparent ease into darkness. Isobel Dixon’s work has natural authority; the reader trusts her to get the details right.

David Morley

Unpublished endorsement:  Frogs, birds, bats, baboons, monkeys, peacocks, lizards and boars leap, crawl, shimmer and swoop through Isobel Dixon's lusciously feral and finely crafted poems. The Tempest Prognosticator signals so many fresh, often surreal, insights; with its bold, eclectic approach to the traditional and the experimental, and irreverent juxtapositions of subject matter and form, it's a wake-up call to the imagination and the senses and suggests myriad possibilities of what a poem can do and be.

Catherine Smith

Unpublished endorsement:  Frogs, birds, bats, baboons, monkeys, peacocks, lizards and boars leap, crawl, shimmer and swoop through Isobel Dixon's lusciously feral and finely crafted poems; while moths ‘crash the party,’ the ostriches of Struzzi are ‘Shabby ballerinas/all gone at the knees’ and a whale shows up in the Thames ‘one wintry Friday, come to visit us.’ And the human zoo is no less intriguing. The Tempest Prognosticator signals so many fresh, often surreal, insights; with its bold, eclectic approach to the traditional and the experimental, and irreverent juxtapositions of subject matter and form, it's a wake-up call to the imagination and the senses and suggests myriad possibilities of what a poem can do and be.

Catherine Smith

Review quote:  Isobel Dixon shows great accessible range with this refreshing and exhilarating collection. Nature, real and unreal, is evoked as the poet perfectly captures a world where not all is as it seems and where nature and art intersect with a wonderfully pleasing outcome. We find Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked on the moon, whilst Hirst, Marais and Rousseau are invoked to aid the collection’s overarching themes of loss and despair. A brilliantly surreal collection, THE TEMPEST PROGNOSTICATOR will appeal to readers for its invention, wide-ranging allusions and playful (and sometimes painful) explorations of the modern self through a rich tapestry of nature and culture.

Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Autumn 2011

Previous review quote:  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.

Clive James

Previous review quote:  Isobel Dixon’s poetry moves from observation or memory to metaphor in a silky glide…. with a beautifully controlled surrealism that shapes and narrates internal states.

Shaun de Waal
Mail & Guardian (South Africa)

Previous review quote:  Most striking is Dixon’s penchant for short powerful bursts of insight or reflection. She knows when enough is enough and the word choice of her free verse often commands some powerful imagery. ….This is a modern poet in fine command of her art.

Dan Szczesny
The Hippo (USA)

Previous review quote:  A contemporary, accessible lyricism… characterised by sensuous natural imagery.

James Tink
PN Review

Previous review quote:  Isobel Dixon’s work is characterised as much by her strong lyrical voice as by her central preoccupations of settlement, exploration and selfhood…. Dixon confidently moves from sharply pitched observations in shorter verse to elegantly expressive longer pieces. …There are strong hints in her work that she has much more to say and there is no one better placed, or rather, displaced, to say it.

Alex Pryce
Contemporary Writers

Previous review quote:  A precision reminiscent of Szymborska … What characterises Dixon’s poetry most poignantly is its accessibility, which should not be mistaken for simplicity. Written in free verse, her work exudes ease and unpretentiousness. Dixon is fully in command of the poetic tools at her disposal. In her hands form and content intertwine naturally, never allowing the reader’s attention to wane. Intelligent and sensuous, Dixon’s poetry has the wonderful quality of being able to hold the essence of a variety of moods, places and people, which many readers, whether poetry lovers or not, will find engrossing.

Karina Magdalena Szczurek
Sunday Independent (South Africa)

Previous review quote:  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.

Tim Liardet

Previous review quote:  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

Previous review quote:  Another lyrical voice is Isobel Dixon, whose A Fold in the Map has a powerful section charting the illness and death of her father.

Elaine Feinstein
The Times

Previous review quote:  When my father died a few years ago I was totally inconsolable and found comfort only in books – especially books of poetry such as Isobel Dixon’s A Fold in the Map, in which she writes about the death of her father.

Grethe Fox
Femina