"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.

"Bearings" by Isobel Dixon (Nine Arches Press, 2016)

Let's start with "A Part of Me is Gone". To paraphrase - the loss of a parent can be likened to losing one's identical twin. The sound bites are "Death, it seems, the fiercest/ raider of identity,/ for the survivor too - / self's theft ... I'm the damaged bit that's left".

• The first stanza's lines have an 8/4/4/4/4/4 syllable count, the 3rd and 6th lines end-rhyming "one" with "run".
• The second stanza's count in 6/5/5/6/7/8. The 3rd and 6th lines still rhyme - "theft" with "bereft".
• The third and final stanza only has 5 lines of irregular length, the last ending in "left".

There's a sense of the person unravelling, composure dissolving. It's the book's most organised piece. I like all I've pointed out so far about the poem. The rest of the poem I'm less sure about.

With some poets I feel I know what they're trying to achieve. With this poet I have more trouble. Even when I like a poem, there are parts that seem, to me, to defeat (or at least dilute) the purpose. A clue perhaps is in the Acknowledgements where not only are magazines (including Prairie Schooner) mentioned, but the editors too. Add in collaborators, judges, those who are quoted on the covers (Clive James, Roddy Lumsden, Glyn Maxwell, JM Coetzee, Penelope Shuttle) and the dedicatees (7 names - there's even an i.m. Michael Donaghy poem) and you have quite an inhabited book.

Poets are sometimes told to see significance in the apparently small and trivial. Some poems here do the opposite, name-dropping big scientific concepts (though given that one piece was written for a musical event called "Music in the space time continuum" it was perhaps doomed from the start). I don't get "Why?". It's a list of stock answers to the title's question - "Because I say so", etc. The final two lines are "Lambda (at present unknown)./ Lambda at present unknown.". This lambda is, I presume, the cosmological constant determining whether the universe will expand or crunch. All the same, I don't really get those two lines.

I'm allergic to pieces like "The Occupation" - a travelogue with a twist of concern at the end. I've doubts about "Japan Notebook, December 2004" for similar reasons. In contrast, "Doppelgänger" tries too hard, with centred sections and too many notes. I've doubts about her noun-only pieces, and pieces with scattered, artsy layouts.

I like much of her content and imagery though - e.g. "Flip the pillows/ on the griddle of the bed/ seeking out the only sweet spot left" (p.67). I like the start of "In Which, the switch". "In Which, More Jazz" shows that she can play with words - "You can drown in the black lakes of piano lids./ I know. Grand Rapids, down in one./ Dying Falls, Niagara-style, a barrel of laughs until/ it's your turn, luv" - sliding effectively from one phrase into the next.

I think I'd prefer her raw material to the way she's developed it into poems. "Trade Matters" could easily be prose, so it might as well be. "Jerusalem Stone" has a partial (.bcb.ceeb) rhyme-scheme which doesn't help the content. Making the material of "Gaza" into a haiku doesn't help. I'd have lists of little prose insights, epigrams, witticisms, journal entries, observations etc, rather than make each one into a "poem". But so many people like her work that I realise this my problem, not hers.

The book ends simply and well with "Wake" - "how we leave/ a white road on the sea/ for a while".

Other reviews

• Michael King (What for me were the most enjoyable features of this collection are matters of poetic craft, rather than the subject matter. ... Of particular interest to me were the seven double-page spreads which each presented four poem fragments or sections in which the poet examines a momentary thought, or impression, without in any way building them into a sustained or completed work. Yet each idea is strong and pointed, almost the way a throw-away line in conversation works far better than a fully coherent discourse.)

"A Fold in the Map" by Isobel Dixon (Salt, 2007)

• "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 elan 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.
• "What characterises Dixon's poetry most poignantly is its accessibility, which should not be mistaken for simplicity", Karina Magdalena Szczrek.

It's in 2 pamphlet-sized, themed parts, the first about childhood and displacement, the second about her father's death. There's a feeling that the words don't matter, that the line-breaks don't matter, and that the stanza breaks are paragraph breaks. Perhaps she's reclaiming the terrain that prose stole from verse. But for me the imagery sometimes looks like adornment, a localised effect detached from the layers below and above.

• "Christmas Beetles" begins with "Outside, the afternoon is ringing,/ ringing, massed cicadas singing out/ their silly news. The hot/ brown garden's loud/ with all their gossipmongering.// The insect grapevine - shrill bush telephone - incessant beetle headlines". Ok, so we get the message. Perhaps the incessant metaphor symbolises the incessant heat. All the same, "grapevine" is unfortunate.
• "Weather Eye" begins with "In summer when the Christmas beetles/ filled each day with thin brass shrilling,/ heat would wake you, lapping at the sheet" and later has "while on the stove the pressure cooker chugged/ in tandem with the steamy day" ... "Then if the temperature had dropped enough/ the stays were loosened and the house undressed/ for night" ... then in the final paragraph we have "These chill machines/ don't do it half as true, the loving regulation/ of the burning days.". They're all decent images in their way until you pick at them (what is the chugging in tandem with?) and try to connect the images together (was the heat dry and burning, or humid?)

But perhaps this is all deliberate because elsewhere she can co-ordinate imagery - "Gemini" has if anything too much co-ordination: "sea-horse girls", "silt", "hull", "sewage", "wider sea", "adrift", "tadpole", "salty soup", "waves", "pacific". "buoy me". "plain sailing".

The imagery isn't meant to be striking. I like "The phone is a cruel mouthpiece,/ pain's propaganda tool. A megaphone/ for our confusion, for the rest/ only delivering half." ("Tear") but I've heard something much like the following before: "The clear 'good morning' from your smiling face/ settling among us like a dove" ("Crossing"). When there's too much accessibility, it's compensated by a bigger finish: "(I Want) Something to Show for It" strolls towards the final single-lined stanza "I am the sea come to swallow the pier". Standard imagery and events are more common in the second section. Grief's not easy to write about, so I guess it's impressive that several of the poems in the second section work at all, but the book's too long, and nothing in the second section quite matches the poignancy of the cover images.

I think her strength is the plotting. Students write essays about "Plenty" and many of the other pieces have the shape of a "personal essay", thematic images rising gently into view as readers stroll along towards a moral. For example "Foreshadow" (which I like) begins "I set myself this task:/ walk home from school on shadows -". After an interesting selection of shadows we end with "Didn't she understand// that once you've set out on your odyssey/ you're bound to it, rules you cannot break?". "The Skinning" might be laid out as ragged-right prose. "Kudu Watch" and many of the other pieces (especially those with 3-line stanzas) might as well be formatted as prose.