"A whistling of birds" by Isobel Dixon (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from Anthropocene, Bad Lillies, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Dark Horse, etc. Illustrations by Douglas Robertson. D.H. Lawrence, birds and snakes feature.

I have things to learn from the lightness of touch in poems like "Larch Fog", the first poem. It begins with "How the twigs make a fog between the trunks". Stanza 2 says "Sometimes it seems you write,/ Bert, about the lives of people/ just to shape the landscape/ that you move them in" (the poem is "For D.H.Lawrence" who was known as Bert). In stanza 4 and 5 it says "your generous hoard of living names -// is not just so much backdrop,/ but the kernel and juice of it". The poem ends with a list mostly of plant names.

There are quotes from DH Lawrence poems interlaced in the poems.

"Fantasis for Small Octopus Orchestra" has freewheeling layout and ideas. "the bats" has phrases scattered around the page. Like bats I suppose.

She's skilled at stretching an idea to fill a page - see "Man", "Threshold, etc - though the 3 lines of "the seahorse always breaks my heart" isn't enough for a poem. And sometimes the poetry sounds more like flowery prose.

• In "Dung Beetle", " You might pooh-pooh or patronise/ this humble enterprise,/ but he's guided by a higher light than ours/ (his Egyptian cousin was a god/ who rolled the dung-sun through the skies).". There's an aabca rhyme scheme in these lines, which seems accidental. And does "pooh-pooh" work?
• "Utterance" is poetic - "The voices speak to us/ down the avenues of years/ with the tender tongues of trees ... rain drenching the stubbled fields/ a drumbeat rising in a metal pot/ paper water lilies floating/ in a bowl of Chinese porcelain"
• "The Secret Peach" ends with - "An old woman fading in a foreign land/ will thirst for that particular juice,/ will call out for it, searching/ for the peach's proper name,/ forgetting that she ate, we ate,/ the peaches from those trees each year/ and never knew it written down,/ in any of our languages"
• In "My Sweet Fiorenza" "The woman on the step holds out her paper cup,/ rattling her coins - aiuta, aiuta! - rattling her damnable coins through my veins/ and the church, swollen with its own mythology,/ is too tight for my thoughts. For once/ I let the candles be, head for the blessed air."
• "The Spiders of Ragusa" has "wrapped in wintry webs/ a postponed Halloween// veiled in close-spun white/ the sunbold citrus orbs/ are muted lamps/ and you daren't touch/ the resolute archnid tapestry".

I like "Rosa x damascena" (2 pages) and ç (34 long lines)

There are over 3 pages of useful notes.