REVIEW | Isobel Dixon's poems in A Whistling of Birds form a rich and extensive tapestry

BOOK: A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon (Human & Rousseau)

South African literature is rich in poets, many of them women. Isobel Dixon is one of those; born in Mthatha, raised in Graaff-Reinet and now living in Cambridge, she is one of the South African writers who have established themselves as both here and elsewhere – Eben Venter, Zoë Wicomb, JM Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and others.

She addresses this way of being an émigré writer in a mysterious poem dedicated to JMC called Greensward, which references the Karoo. One assumes this must be the one and only John Maxwell Coetzee, who has said of Dixon's earlier work that it is "a virtuoso collection, the work of a poet confident in her mastery of her medium". And this is perhaps what is most striking about Dixon: her confidence.