Observe the sand gazelle
who with a shrinking heart
survives the drought –
Isobel Dixon was born and raised in South Africa before moving to the U.K. in her twenties. As a result, her poems contain a mixture of imagery, metaphors, and symbols representative of at least two different continents. The African background and history is not omnipresent and as a result when it does show up it is all the more powerful a statement because of it. This reference to one of the animals most strongly associated with Africa is purely the sake of metaphor that reaches across continents to connect global humanity. It is a call for learning from animals—and others—to adapt to possibility of change that seems impossible to fight against. Surviving drought in the desert is about as seemingly impossible a task as one can imagine, the worst of two worlds.
When I was young and there were five of us,
all running riot to my mother’s quiet despair,
our old enamel tub, age-stained and pocked
upon its griffin claws, was never full.
The opening lines of this poem situate a major recurring theme to be found throughout the author’s body of work. Dixon returns again and again to her family as a subject to covered, a topic to explored and theme to expound upon. This poem is a recollection of the family unit as a whole, the domestic foundation upon which so many lives are constructed not by choice, but the whim of fate. Other poems are directed more precisely, especially those that revolved around emotions toward or recollections of the poet’s mother and father. They are confessional in nature, typically, but often lack the confessional poet’s tendency to make everything about themselves.
If anything is dark,
it's this damp island
with its sluggish days,
its quieter, subtler ways
of drawing blood.
The trans-global duality of Dixon as a poet is revealed here in the counterpoint to the imagery of Africa which populates much of the verse. This excerpt is the second stanza. In the first, the speaker is wistful about leaving Africa even though the imagery used to describe is mosquito bites and the stifling heat of its climate. By comparison, the return home to the U.K. is portrayed is the one which is initially portrayed as part of a “dark” continent. The imagery between her two homelands—the one occasioned by accident of birth and the one chosen freely of her own will—are structured as a juxtaposition of hot and cold and dry and damp, but the exclamation mark here is the ripping apart of conventional expectations of savagery between the British and African experience.
