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’
