The Tempest Prognosticator

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘The exquisitely written poems in Isobel Dixon's new collection teach us how to read the world anew. Richly and vividly observant, they also treasure the things that are "most beautiful with your eyes closed" (Vision). Indeed, writing and its small comforts can keep us from plunging blindly into "our joint and secret griefs" (So Many Henries), "a hyphen/of a wall to keep us from the irresistible" (Every Valley Shall Be Exalted). And yet in these lines, falling is itself a kind of "euphoric vertigo" that can "open up the world and its great mystery" (Days of Miracle and Wonder) to us, as this collection does’ —Gabeba Baderoon

'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

A Fold in the Map

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. ... What to make then of a poet who feels displaced, unsettled and in-between? Much, I believe, and we can only hope our own senses of personal diaspora can be articulated with such ‘quiet ease’. Her work is darkly primitive in places, a carefully constructed extraction of personal roots from the very soil of South Africa. 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, Critical Perspective on British Council Contemporary Writers site.

Isobel Dixon’s A Fold in the Map was also excellent. ... It needs to be read in one go and it really rewards the reader if you read it like a novel from start to finish. Isobel Dixon’s a real talent I believe, and these poems are highly impressive for their emotional truth, and the élan and love with which she writes about her father. You end up liking the poet a lot after reading this book, which is too rare an event in poetry. —David Morley, Christmas Choice 2008.

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 Christmas Choice 2007. "Elaine Feinstein picks the year’s most sublime verses"

[Poetry] evoking the textures and shapes of this country ... calling up simple but potent memories of family life. ... The mood is sombre but wry, for the most part, and the poetry moves from observation or memory to metaphor in a silky glide. The strength here is that of precisely recalled sensations and feelings, the traditional work of memory in poetry. ...But, in two marvellous poems in this first half of the volume, metaphor trumps memory: in 'Gemini' and 'She Comes Swimming', there is a beautifully controlled surrealism that shapes and narrates internal states. ... The second part of the volume, titled "Meet My Father", returns to simplicity and directness as the poet returns to meet her father's death and its aftermath. ... Dixon's father comes alive in descriptive fragments ... the freight of memory and love and loss coalesce into profoundly moving elegy; these are "stigmata for my father / and his panel-beaten heart".—Shaun de Waal, Mail and Guardian (South Africa)

Dixon returns with fresh energy and insight to familiar themes such as journeys, family, or self-discovery, also beautifully reflected in the personal cover photographs. … As becomes apparent, many of these poems, overtly focused on intimate and individual experiences, do not lack a broader socio-historical dimension, most strikingly expressed in 'Back in the Benighted Kingdom'. With a precision reminiscent of Szymborska, Dixon evokes here the nostalgia for a mosquito skin bump to hint at colonial, “quieter, subtler ways / of drawing blood.… 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)

A moving and beautiful collection.—Joan Hambidge, Die Burger (translated from the Afrikaans)

There are a number of poets who have been publishing new, exciting and original work in the last few years. These include Isobel Dixon, Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid De Kock, Denis Hirson and the winner of last year’s Ingrid Jonker and Olive Schreiner Prizes, Rustum Kozain.—Tymon Smith, The Sunday Times (SA)

A profoundly moving and engaging collection of poems. —Gwen Podbrey, SA Jewish Report

A Fold in the Map is a steady next step in this interesting new poet’s career. … 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

More understated but no less powerful than [Sophie Hannah and Frances Leviston’s collections] is Isobel Dixon's A Fold in the Map, 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.—Nathalie Whittle, Financial Times

Isobel’s work is gently pervasive. She reads with a confidence and firmness that belies the lyrical lilt of her poetry. Every consonant of her finely-tuned lines is articulated.—Tom Chivers, writer, editor and poetry promoter

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.—Clive James

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

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

Weather Eye

…a contemporary, accessible lyricism... Weather Eye is 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

...a surprisingly diverse selection of work... A significant voice within the milieu of South African poetry. She shows herself to be just as capable of unfolding the intricacies and inherent beauty of the South Africa of her childhood as she is of fearlessly confronting the brooding dread that inhabits the darkest corners of that very same landscape. —Greg Cahl, New Contrast