Review: Bearings by Isobel Dixon

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Photo of Isobel Dixon: Izak de Vries

Bearings
Isobel Dixon
Modjaji
ISBN: 9781928215295

Bearings by Isabel Dixon displays the subtle elegance and finely tuned poetic sense which characterised her earlier three volumes. She uses source material such as that from her worldwide travels and from her family and other relationships to mine deep insights from surface observations and impressions, all the time conveyed through a poetic sensitivity that invites the reader to join with her.

The range of subject matter is wide. There are South African moments, memories of South African heroes murdered by apartheid agents or earlier in our bloodied history, reflections arising from a photograph of women in the leprosy hospitals on Robben Island. Her travels bring about poems from many parts of the world, from Japan, through the Middle East and Europe. She also pays her respects to friends and mentors in moving tributes.

What for me were the most enjoyable features of this collection are matters of poetic craft, rather than the subject matter. This is not to denigrate or belittle the subject matter or her treatment of ideas, but what excited me was the way she engaged with poetics to craft her poems. Her political poems, for example, work on the following basis: politics is in essence a “game”, if one understands the word as describing a rule-governed activity. The rules are the Constitution, the legal framework, and the conventions governing political actions. But Dixon engages with the political rather at a personal level, focusing on the people who control or are controlled by politics. Her poem about the Cradock Four (“Late Knowledge”) starts from within herself and her father, a teacher, and then expands to include another teacher in a town not far away from her, Matthew Goniwe and the other three members of the Cradock Four. She is making a personal point, but it is also powerfully political as well.

Another feature of her poetic craft is her use of minute observation of detail, which enables the reader to be drawn into the scene described. “Dubai Creek” is redolent with local detail: the “iftar fish”, the “wrung-out kurta”, “the sudden whiff of za’atar” – these details locate the evening wander firmly in Dubai and not just any anonymous waterside city. The same can be seen in the scary “ikizukuri”, especially the lovely but macabre phrase “the splash and thwack, thwack, thwack” which catches the three cuts allowed when serving ikizukuri fish. And again in “Pickings”, the minute detail of her description zooms the reader right into the heart of the matter.

The third feature which the collection displays is the quality of sound which Dixon creates. She has a finely tuned ear – for alliteration, strong and soft vowel sounds, and clashing phrases. The poem “Materiality” uses this device powerfully to signal transitions rather than narrative. Her use of enjambment assist the longer rhythms of her phrasing, especially in the long line poems which are so much more powerful for me than the short lines which she also employs, perhaps for different ends. Poems such as “Treasure”, “Dubai Creek” and “Seville Yellow” flow with grace and such cadence that you have to pause your enjoyment of that music to ensure that you engage with the sense of what is being said. And, in contrast, the poem “dead siege” does precisely the opposite – the lines are truncated and scattered visually across the page, mirroring the cognitive disjunctions of the physical experience of the Dead Sea with the intellectual awareness of the tortured history of that region.

Her awareness of words, their shape, features and connotations allows for the very powerful poem “Nouns”. The entire poem consists of nouns only, yet they carry the narrative of the poem cohesively and with effect. This stripping down to the barest essentials is often seen as essential in art (as opposed to the decorative or indulgent display of words) – it makes the point for other contexts as well.

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. These pages work so well, both visually in their layout, and also in the impact they achieve.

I suppose that what impressed me most about the collection is the display by a poet in full control of both the art and the craft of poetry, revealing a keen mind and an insightful intellect, always light and sparkling, never plodding or ponderous, yet always touching on what is important.

 

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