The "birds, beasts and flowers" of Isobel Dixon’s new collection are in conversation with DH Lawrence's essay ‘Whistling of Birds’, thus lending this publication its name, though each poem here is its own vivid testament to the natural world, and our often troubled and troubling place in it.

Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, the poems share points of creative contact with Lawrence’s iconic collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers and makers. Threaded throughout is the beautiful complexity and vulnerability of the planet, and the joy and difficulty of making art. With its resonant elegies and notes of celebration, this is a collection that flexes, hums and brims with energy, yet draws you surely in to its quiet, reflective heart.

Poetry as powerful connection and recapitulation, and, even in landscapes of exile and diminishment, the art of rewilding and replenishing the self.

Shortlisted for Crime Writers' Association International Dagger 2019 Traumatic stress causes Inspector Albertus Beeslaar to trade tough city policing for a backwater posting on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. But his dream of rural peace is soon shattered when a beautiful and eccentric artist and her four-year-old daughter are found murdered on a local farm. Brooding. Riveting. Brilliant. Deon Meyer, author of Dead at Daybreak This arresting English-language debut validates Karin Brynard's reputation as 'The Afrikaans Stieg Larsson.' An outstanding thriller. Booklist Crime fiction doesn't get any better. Mike Nicol, author of Payback Karin Brynard has established herself as one of a handful of great thriller writers in South Africa. Mail & Guardian

A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one’s native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey.

In the first part of the collection, Plenty – “before the fold” – the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad — a father’s illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.

“A fold in the map” is a nod to Jan Morris’s Trieste And The Meaning of Nowhere, where the traveller’s state of inbetween-ness is explored. In these poems of longing for home, family and other loved ones, Isobel Dixon draws on a rich store of natural imagery, illuminating the ordinary, at times with a touch of wry humour. These are accessible lyrical poems that will speak memorably to all those who have travelled, loved and lost.

In her fourth collection, Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places. From Robben Island to Hiroshima, Egypt to Edinburgh, the West Bank and beyond, these poems are forays of discovery and resistance, of arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. As Dixon explores form and subject, and a sometimes troubled past, 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.