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’
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 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 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
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
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, GBP12.99), 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 Isobel 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 Szczrek Sunday Independent (South Africa)
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