I met Isobel Dixon at the London launch of Sidekick Books wonderful Birdbook I last summer - her Upupa Epops (you're all such keen birders that you don't need me to tell you what species that's the scientific name of, do you?) is one of the volume's highlights, for me, and a good taster for the superb collection in which it appears, The Tempest Prognosticator.
She was born in Umtata, South Africa, and came to
Scotland to study in 1993. She works in London as a literary agent,
representing a range of clients, including many prominent South African
writers. Her work is included in publications like The Paris Review, The Guardian, Penguin’s Poems for Love, The Forward
Book of Poetry and The Best of
British Poetry 2011. Her first collection Weather Eye won South Africa’s Sanlam and Olive Schreiner Prizes.
Her second collection A Fold in the Map
was published in the UK by Salt and in South Africa by Jacana, and The Tempest Prognosticator, is published
in the UK by Salt and in South Africa by Random House’s Umuzi imprint. It’s
been described as “a virtuoso collection” by J M Coetzee and an “ingenious
carousel of a book” by David Morley.
One of the things I
enjoyed most about this collection was the vividly African flavour of many of
the poems, both in subject matter and in the language used. How often do you
get back to South Africa, and do you find that an essential spark to your
creativity?
I’m glad you can feel Africa in it, even though there’s a
wider ranger of themes and settings than in the more overtly homesick and
family-focused A Fold in the Map. There’s a lot more London, Yorkshire, England
in The Tempest Prognosticator, partly reflecting how long I’ve lived and worked
on this island. But South Africa remains essential to my life and writing. I go
back twice a year, for publishing work and to see family and friends, and just to
be at home in the Karoo for a while. My mother still lives in the house where I
and my sisters grew up, and this old house and my home town Graaff-Reinet remain
crucial places for me. I was thinking of
it as I wrote as a harbour or dry dock and the phrase ‘refreshment station’
keeps popping into my mind – what the Dutch East India Company called the
settlement at the Cape, a place for sailors to pick up fresh water and fruit
and vegetables on their long sea journeys. A way to prevent emotional scurvy,
perhaps…!
Strangely, I don’t write a lot when I’m back in the Cape
(both Western and Eastern), because there is so much else to pack into the
days, but I do take a lot of notes, jotting down ideas all the time. The long
drives between towns, through my country’s glorious landscapes, are also
fruitful thinking times, and some poems invariably emerge after I leave,
sometimes even on the return flight. Aeroplanes and trains seem to be essential
to my writing too…A virtue of frequent necessity perhaps.
Just a word, too, about your writing processes. The Tempest
Prognosticator holds together very well as a themed collection, but was equally
enjoyable to dip in and out of. Was it a case of writing ‘occasional’ poems
that started to cohere around a central point?
Some of the poems in The Tempest Prognosticator have
travelled a long way, several pre-dating my previous collection A Fold in the
Map.
In both A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator I
have some poems that were first published in my South African debut collection Weather
Eye, which is no longer in print, though you can find the odd copy on the web. Weather
Eye was never widely distributed outside South Africa and while it was a very
important book for me, as all first books are to their creators, I wanted to
give some of those early poems a new life in a new context. When I came to put
together the manuscript for my second
collection I realised that there were narrative
family poems like Plenty and the title poem Weather Eye which fitted well
into the divided shape of what became my
first UK publication A Fold in the Map – where the first half mainly looks back
to childhood and my country of birth, often from the vantage point of the UK;
and where the second half traces my father’s illness and death, that terrible
journey we made together as a family, coping with the process of loss. While I
was writing constantly, out of my own need, when my father first became
seriously ill, I had no intention of publishing the resulting poems, not till
later when my mother and sisters had read them, and they’d grown to form some
narrative arc of their own. But I didn’t want a collection that was just about
grief, I wanted to show some of the fullness too, more of the light, and so the
two halves took shape together.
So there were many poems I’d already written by the time A
Fold in the Map was published that just weren’t right for the form and tone of
that collection, and I knew I would use them in another very different
collection later. Poems like Vision, the opening poem of The Tempest
Prognosticator, which appeared in The Wolf in 2004, or Days of Miracle and Wonder which
was in The Paris Review the same year.
The poems of The Tempest Prognosticator are poems that
spring from many interlinked concerns and fascinations – like the South African
natural scientist and poet Eugene Marais, whose writing inspired Toktokkie
and The Inopportune Baboon, and perhaps some more work to come. There are
poems that spring from love of travel, art, film, and a fascination with
aspects of the quirkiness of life and human inventiveness, as in the title
poem, about a Victorian device which used leeches to predict storms. Maybe
because I grew up in an extremely dry part of the world where everyone is a
sky-watcher and rain-measurer, I am also a little obsessed with ideas of the
weather…
So the new collection jettisons family in favour of animals
– but that’s not to say I’ve switched my concerns completely, the collection is
just a different beast for a different season. I am slowly writing a series of
poems about my mother too, but that’s for some time ahead.
There’s a veritable bestiary in there, too. I liked the
balance struck between exact description of animals, birds, even insects, and
their metaphorical use. Is that something that’s always been a part of your
poetry?
I was once asked at a reading if I wrote so much about
animals and insects because I don’t like people… But I think (hope) the human
is very present in even the most creaturely of The Tempest Prognosticator
poems.
But yes, nature, the creatures, have always been a part of
the writing. Again because it’s all always been, completely naturally, part of
my life. We ran quite wild as kids, in wide open but safe spaces, far from the
city. A big garden at the back of our own house, a small town in a horsehoe of
(mostly dry) river, surrounded by the Karoo plains and mountains. Every holiday
spent on my uncle’s farm, involved in the daily work. Two of my sisters live on a farm, one of my sisters is a
painter who does a lot of Karoo landscapes,
and we all love walking, the African outdoors, the wildlife. The eldest and
youngest have just been on a tent safari holiday in Botswana together and I’m feeling
very envious (though I like to keep a whole lot further away from the crocs and
hippos than my adventurous heroine, Mary Kingsley of Beetle, Fish &
Fetish, did…). I think the first
rambling free verse poem I wrote as a kid was about the Karoo and drought…And
the natural world is just so rich and present, a realm of endless fascination,
and the more you learn, as well as observe personally, the more amazing it all
seems. Much as I love London, I often need to get away from the relentlessly
urban, both in reality and in imagination.
So the idea of a tapestry made of spider silk, as in Silking the Spider, was irresistible, or the confluence of nature and art, the
making and remaking of Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in Requiem. It’s why I
love Eugene Marais’s writing in The Soul of the Ape and The Soul of the White
Ant, groundbreaking work and writing from a tragic life. It’s why I was drawn
to Mary Kingsley’s brilliant and witty observations of the West African jungle,
which I plundered for Beetle, Fish & Fetish, or Robert Byron’s odd, funny
and moving anecdote about an over-affectionate wild boar in The Road to Oxiana,
which I recast in The Poor Wild Boar Who Went Too Far. These last two poems
were both written as part of a commission for The Travel Bookshop (now sadly
closed) in 2010.
Which links to to your ‘occasional poems’ question earlier.
For this, as with several of the themed group projects that led to poems in the
collection (like the Pink Floyd and English Counties nights), I was involved in
initiating and organising the event. So along with Simon Barraclough and
Richard Price, I spent several happy hours in the Travel Bookshop, with more
fantastic source material than I could mine in a year. Other poems also came
from commissions for books or events: Mountain War Time for Roddy Lumsden’s 50
States event, and Upupa Epops and A Parliament of Gulls, written for
Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone’s lovely Birdbook I, a chance I’ll admit I seized on
with gull-like greed. I’d never set up or take up a commission that didn’t
chime with something I wanted to write, but I do like the creative pressure
that comes from writing to a certain theme, and of course, a deadline.
A final note on ‘the bestiary’ is that for the South African
launch of The Tempest Prognosticator my
sister Janet organised an art exhibition in her gallery, ArtKaroo, in
Oudtshoorn, where two South African artists, Leanette Botha and Susqya
Williams, produced visual interpretations of some of the poems. It was fascinating to see their vision of the
creatures – the boars, zebras, lizards,
baboons, orang-utans, camels, toktokkies, ostriches and more taking vigorous
and colourful shape off the page. You can see a selection here.
Following on from that, is your first collection, Weather
Eye, still available anywhere?
Only here and there on the web and from second hand dealers
– as mentioned before, there are Weather Eye traces in A Fold in the Map and The
Tempest Prognosticator, though there are poems that are published solely in the
debut book. I only have a few copies left myself.
Other highlights for me were some absolutely exquisite short
poems – A Mess Of Vinegar, Only Adapt, Paradox and valentine among them. I
occasionally suspect that such shorter pieces get a bit undervalued in
contemporary British poetry – do you think that’s the case?
Thank you, that’s wonderful to hear. I’m a fan of the short
poem myself – not just the subtlety of the haiku, but also short sharp shocks
of poems. Emily Dickinson’s brilliance in her spare dashed lines, Les Murray’s Poems
the Size of Photographs, and so many more.
There’s talk of a return of greater appreciation for the
short story, the essay, the novella, perhaps because we are not so restricted
by the bound format and read our texts in so many ways these days, including
the web and Kindles and Kobos, and all the devices still being developed and
named. Maybe it’s that way with the short poem too – though it’s never been out
of favour with readers, I believe, despite not being seen as substantial enough
to win poetry prizes when up against longer work, and not published as much in
journals. It’s great to see Magma launch their new short poem prize, for poems
of up to 10 lines. Penguin’s Poems for Love anthology, edited by Laura Barber,
includes a very short two-liner poem of mine, truce (not yet in a collection).
Perhaps love (and hate) poems, in the tradition of Catullus’s Odi et Amo are
perfect for that short, sharp, shock treatment…
Finally, I wonder how your day job as a literary agent
affects your poetry, if at all?
I’m lucky to have a completely absorbing passion for my
professional life, a job where no two days, or books, or authors, are alike. It
is pretty full-on though, and work and private life aren’t very boundaried. The
poetry weaves its way between this, in early mornings, late nights, weekends
between manuscript reading. I’m never without a notebook and various pens (nothing
worse than being on an overnight flight when your only pen’s just erupted.) My
own writer clients are a great example in their focus, dedication and hard
work.
Commissions and joint projects do help to keep the poetry
from being completely swamped by my job. The rigour of a deadline’s very useful
here. So I’m working on a production for this year’s centenary of the sinking
of the Titanic, along with poets Chris McCabe and Simon Barraclough, musician and
composer Oliver Barrett, and film-maker Jack Wake-Walker. I will be following
that with an art and poetry project with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson. More
weather, and more creatures, in view with those two….
Three poems from The Tempest Prognosticator
Upupa Epops
Scarce
passage migrant regular enough to skim the south
of
this glib outcrop with your pied and pinkish now-and-then
but
still, erratic flitter on the wing, old vaudevillean,
knowing
that you’ll cause a flutter on the wires.
A
prophet less respected in those backyard days
you
poked about our frazzled lawn, a dandy priest.
Familiarity
and all the blah it breeds.
Who
knew, so dapper in your black-barred
cinnamon-cum-chestnut
raiment, you’d turn out to be,
back
home, a smelly nester of the first degree?
The
sins fine feathers and a rather natty crest can hide.
Oop-oop-oops,
indeed.
Your
Giant St Helena Ancestor went dodo,
long
before Napoleon and the Giant Earwig did.
But
still you pop up here and there, to stride and plunge
that
beaky scythe, delving the underworld for breakfast –
spiders
easy over, ant lions sunny side up,
a
take-out gogga, kriek or two to feed the brood.
You
foul your hidden clutch of milky-blue. Tree-caved,
surviving
critters shit at probing eyes, and hiss like snakes.
Only Adapt
Observe the sand gazelle
who with a shrinking heart
survives the drought –
an admirable desert art,
this making small, a skill
that we who doubt
the seasonal largesse
must learn as well.
Paradox
There’s no telling what
will make the heart leap, frog-
like, landing with a soggy plop.
Love startles, makes a mockery
of us, and yet we lie awake
at night and croak and croak for it.
