About Bearings:

See here for the Nine Arches UK edition
& here for Modjaji's South African edition.

In Bearings, her fourth collection, Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places. From Robben Island to Hiroshima, Egypt to Edinburgh, the West Bank and beyond, these poems are forays of discovery and resistance, of 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. As Dixon explores form and subject, and a sometimes troubled past, 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.

 

Praise for Bearings:

'Isobel Dixon's recent poems confirm her sumptuous gift of mining for melody all the way down to the syllable, but it is remarkable how she can go on tightening her focus even as she widens her range of topic. With every airport lounge a new starting point, her poetry is truly an international event. Admiringly, one is forced to the conclusion that she is becoming a poet who, far from hiding in lyricism, uses it for adventure and exploration, like a magician's cloak. Her work is a perpetual transformation, inexhaustible even though anything in it can be said aloud, and indeed demands to be. There is something new under the sun on every page.’ – Clive James

‘Here is a new collection by a poet at ease with a variety of forms and approaches, and possessing the confidence to address experiment in her work. The poems often sparkle with colour, and are feisty, full of rich doubt, and complex considerations of world and self. Much energy is released into being by these poems, whether the poet is drawing on her South African roots in both contemporary and historic settings, or whether her subject is Seville, Cambridge or Dubai. A wide-ranging collection in many senses then, venturesome and powerful, remaining in the mind long after reading.’ – Penelope Shuttle

‘Isobel Dixon's poetry has been praised for its melodic qualities, for the ways it deals with the wonders of travel and the peculiarities of diverse locations, for its historical evocations, and for its humane renderings of telling details or intimate moments. Her fourth collection, Bearings, contains all of these hallmarks but is also striking for its deceptively subtle formal innovations. These are the kinds of formal poems that even the staunchest free verse advocate might tolerate or even love, but which demonstrate the specific kind of craft that formalists admire.’ – Arin Keeble, New Walk

‘Isobel Dixon's lusciously feral and finely crafted poems - so many fresh, often surreal, insights - [a] bold, eclectic approach to the traditional and the experimental, and irreverent juxtapositions of subject matter and form - a wake-up call to the imagination and the senses and suggests myriad possibilities of what a poem can do and be.’ – Catherine Smith