Isobel Dixon
A whistling of birds, with illustrations by Douglas Robertson
Publisher: Human & Rousseau (2023)
ISBN: 9780798184144
A whistling of birds is Isobel Dixon’s fifth collection of poems and is described on her website as a work “deeply concerned with nature and the paths we track through our environment”. She is of the Karoo. Her Scottish father, who served as dean of the cathedral in Mthatha, and her Eastern Cape mother, who grew up on a farm near Bedford, raised their daughters in a book-filled, rambling house in Graaff-Reinet. Dixon studied English literature at Stellenbosch University and applied linguistics in Edinburgh before leaping, as she puts it, into publishing as a literary agent in London, and she has since lived in two worlds.
The collection takes its title from an essay by DH Lawrence, which wonders where birdsong in spring comes from, these threads of sound thrown into the air from the frozen land. Each poem in the collection is a whistling, a “fine world of silver-fecund creation gathering itself and taking place upon us”, as Lawrence describes his birds.
Dixon’s snakes, bees, bats, wreckfish, crabs, dung beetle, praying mantis and multitudinous flowers coexist with Lawrence’s birds, beasts and flowers, as well as with the animal and plant life of several other writers and artists, resulting in a weave of evocation and allusion spanning different geographies, referencing diverse histories and recording heterogeneous life forms. These are poems of travel and of writing, as Lawrence himself travelled and wrote.
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The intertexts, coordinates and ontologies offered in the poems create an intricate network of significance in which many voices are deployed, some echoing others, a polyphony that exalts in the musicality of language [...]
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The intertexts, coordinates and ontologies offered in the poems create an intricate network of significance in which many voices are deployed, some echoing others, a polyphony that exalts in the musicality of language, the tone and pulse of words, their conjunctions and conjurations. Dixon refers in her essay “On the question of voice” (also on her website) to the “distinctive voiceprint” of the writer that we as readers experience at an “instinctual level” – its “rhythm, timbre, resonance”. In her collection, the distinctive voiceprint of the writer is often entwined with the voices of others, which itself becomes a distinctive voiceprint.
In some poems, the typography is sculpted into shape. Crabs in “Before the storm” skitter down to the breaking waves on the seashore in a frenzy of scattered words on the page. The antlion cones into the sand in “Myrmeleon”, and all the speaker knows of it is its “disappearance” as the text itself gyres to a vanishing point:
show me
the final punctum
of sweet vanishing
the point to be
transformed
unspeaking
shedding
names
into
a grain
of sun
a
flare
of
s
a
n
d
If the animal other is imaged here as a portal to a word-shedding vanishing of self, the snake in “The pass of adders” emerges with resplendent patterning from the shedding of dead skin:
O the great good Fortune of Snake
to be able to slip, again, again, her skin
leave behind the dried-out patterning
Snakes feature widely in the collection. They appear among the strelitzias in “Kirstenbosch”; one is trapped in “Snake in the dam”, circling slowly in the shallow water, with no purchase on the smooth plaster of the inside wall. There is also “The snakes”, the referents of which are coiled in Cobra Polish tins suspended from a workshop beam until the uncle, who has caught them, next goes to town to sell them to the snake park:
And we hold our breaths in the workshop’s smell
of oil, dull gleam of tools, the wrench, the iron vice,
and the invisible coils.
I know they know I’m here,
that below them is a human, small,
trying not to breathe too loud.
I know they know me, as their tongues flick,
tasting sunlit dust and the nervy scent of girl.
The animal’s awareness of the human is also a question to the human. “The guests” describes a rainy season visitation by small frogs that squeeze under the kitchen door into the farmhouse: “A teeming hoard/ of green-gold coins, exploding/ sovereigns, elasticated stars”, their froglet throats throbbing in the palm of the hand, speaking to us:
We have come out of the earth,
The rains have called us here.
Now what will you do?
What to do, other than marvel and set them free, hoping the wild endures, which is not assured? Thus many poems register an anxiety for life on earth. In “On first spotting a snake’s head fritillary”, the speaker embraces the “unexpected wonderment” of her first fritillaries, but is “fearful too for us and these rare shades,/ too little marsh left at the margins of clipped lives”. And there is “Dead heron, burnt fox”, which references Hughes’s dream of a flaming fox that enters his room on two legs, walks across an unfinished essay on the desk, leaves a burning paw print on the written page, and says to the sleeper (and readers), “You’re killing us.”
There are poems in which we kill and displace one another. “Rosa x damascena” describes a past visit to Syria, where the speaker was told that “Douma used to smell of roses”, but now there is war, with the “scent of gunpowder and blood” and an old man raging to the television camera, “Where is the world? We are humans, not animals!” In “ç”, the boy on a bus from Moçambique to an unknown place “imagines the limaçon of Pascal, a journey mathematical/ and beautiful”, but what if
this journey’s not an O, but a broken C, like the metal handle
of the dresser, slipped out of its clasp. What will happen
in the gap – not every adventurer circles back. Sometimes
a venturer is just a refugee.
Nature may be a sanctuary, the “quiet encapsulating of green/ place to be seen and not be seen” described in “In nature”, or it may have nothing to do with us, as in “The tempest”, where it is “about the storm, and what the wilful/ torrent cursives down, cadence on candid skin”. Not about us, but still about language, about cursive writing, the interlinking of characters and synaesthesia, the touch of the cadence.
There are flowers, named as Lawrence named his flowers, with not backdrop names but “living names”, as “Larch fog” describes them: “the kernel and the juice of it”. There is “Sweet violet” and its “little finger-flare of flowers/ set soft against the bark”, and “Self-portrait in sweet woodruff” with its yearning to sleep on a bed of forest flowers and wake to “apple-green music, pale vanilla light,/ a cup of stem-steeped summer wine”. There is also “Viper’s bugloss”, where the flowers flare up with “pilot flame blue”, and “Gentians for Carole”, with the plant roots “plumbing shades that echo Pluto-deep/ but offering fields of late-year light”. Flowers provide an immersive experience of colour and scent, claim attention to detail and form, and mobilise a language of the senses.
Fruits abound – apple and apricot, peach and fig. In “Age of blossom”, there is a “surge and soothe” of blossoming in an “orchard of rusted swords”:
how a woman,
after the knife, finds
she is still herself
that the girl who walked
under spring-wet trees
is not yet lost
that the sap spurts
greenly under the bark
Of course, there are birds – lark and robin, weaver and heron, sunbird and tirrick. “Also, hummingbirds” is packed with bird images associated with “Pa”, including an owl, a pelican and this surprising pair:
Remember, Pa, that pair of mossies on the coins –
The humblest currency of history, engraved
To say a sparrow shall not fall unseen.
This humblest of birds is the subject of “Bede’s sparrow”, which, as the notes indicate, draws on “Simile of the sparrow” from an ecclesiastical work by Venerable Bede, who describes the bird temporarily taking refuge from winter storms in an Anglo-Saxon great hall, flying in and then out, like the soul’s journey in and out of the brief span of human life. The poem takes a “crossbeam bird’s-eye view” of the Anglo-Saxons congregated in the hall below, the “spell of warmth and hearth”, the “battle-talk and rut”, the cauldron hanging over the fire. When the storm quietens, the sparrow hears “breath upon pipe, the click/ of deer-horn dice”, “sky-sough” and “hound-yawn”, then with “fan of feathers” and “wing-flex” takes flight, “up and out into the night,/ the mystery and the purity of snow”.
“The greensward” imprints itself in a particularly vivid manner, at least for this reader. The measured quatrains and fine-tuned terminal couplet track the passage of the imagination from the “quiet work” of the Karoo veld to the enigmatic communiqué on a “wheeling” Scottish heath. There are spoor of jackal recalling the paw prints of the dream fox and the “Thought-fox” it birthed. The notes of the golden oriole are “vibrating down the centuries”, shuddering the finely wrought web and trembling the spiderling on its dropline, hurting us into artistry:
Incompleteness makes of each
an émigré. Hankering after mastery, to form
a thing within, against the fractured and ill-
tempered times, the looping fugues and preludes
of our lives –
The interweaving of the images of spoor, spider web and birdsong, the spirits of literary predecessors inhabiting the lexis and syntax of the poem, and the reaching across continents to form a thing of beauty out of the recursive furies and displacements of our lives, make the book an astonishing achievement.
The illustrations by Douglas Robertson (apparently less plentiful, alas, in the South African edition) are apt and exquisite – the tirricks in flight along the top margin of the cover, the dung beetle, the lilting skyline and globe of the earth, the whale cradling the planet as it migrates in southern oceans, and the strip of savannah landscape snaking across four blank pages.
The book is a gift.