Bearings

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets - the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller - jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors. As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

Isobel Dixon's debut, Weather Eye, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Her further collections are A Fold in the Map, Bearings and The Tempest Prognosticator, which J.M. Coetzee described as 'a virtuoso collection'. Mariscat published her pamphlet The Leonids, and Nine Arches publish A Whistling of Birds in June 2023. She co-wrote and performed in the Titanic centenary show The Debris Field (with Simon Barraclough and Chris McCabe) and has worked with composers, filmmakers and artists.