The Tempest Prognosticator E-Book

Isobel Dixon

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In The Tempest Prognosticator leeches warn of storms, whales blunder up the Thames, beetles tap out their courtship rituals, and women fall for deft cocktail makers and melancholy apes. With her keen eye and a gift for vividly capturing the natural world, Isobel Dixon entices the reader on a journey where the familiar is not always as it seems at first, where the sideways glance, the double take, yields rich rewards. From Crusoe to Psycho, Pink Floyd to Fred Astaire, the human zoo's at play here too, in a collection filled with 'miracle and wonder', wit and bite.

Leseprobe

The Tempest Prognosticator

Also by Isobel Dixon

Weather Eye

A Fold in the Map

The Debris Field

(with Simon Barraclough & Chris McCabe)

Bearings

The Leonids

The Tempest Prognosticator

Isobel Dixon

ISBN: 978-1-911027-15-7

eISBN: 978-1-913437-85-5

Copyright © Isobel Dixon, 2011, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Isobel Dixon has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Salt Publishing in the United Kingdom in 2011, re-issued July 2018 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14,

Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by Lightning Source

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For my scattered sisters

About the Author

Isobel Dixon was born in Mthatha and grew up in the Karoo region of South Africa, where her debut collection Weather Eye won the Olive Schreiner Prize. She studied in Edinburgh and now works in London. Nine Arches published her fourth collection Bearings, as well as new editions of A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator. She often collaborates with artists, musicians and other poets and has been involved in several multi-media, multi-poet events, including two shows linked to Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho Poetica and Vertiginous. With Simon Barraclough and Chris McCabe she co-wrote, produced and performed in The Debris Field, about the sinking of RMS Titanic. Mariscat published her solo pamphlet The Leonids and her work can also be found in several group pamphlets and anthologies. She has recorded readings of her work on the Poetry Archive.

Contents

Vision

Into the Wild

The Parliament of Gulls

Postcard from the Colonies

Mountain War Time

Upupa Epops

Toktokkie

The Inopportune Baboon

Startling Point

Root Verses

The Deserted Patisserie

You, Me and the Orang-utan

A Beautifully Constructed Cocktail

A Mess of Vinegar

So Many Henries

The Whiteness of the Whale

Requiem

Mall Shoal

The Only Brunette on the Beach

The Merry Jesters

Only Adapt

Capricorn

Robinson in Space

Astronomy Sonnetry

Silking the Spider

O Dreamland

Peacocks in the Boar Garden

Struzzi

Paradox

The Poor Wild Boar Who Went Too Far

valentine

First Faints

Love is a Shadow

Contract

Usury

Housewifery

Familiar

Agama Atra

Moth Storm

Good Company

Days of Miracle and Wonder

Vase

Trappings

King Kong Déjà vu

Beetle, Fish & Fetish

Every Valley Shall Be Exalted

The Tempest Prognosticator

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

– Henry James

Vision

At first you think they’re birds,

swooping low

into the summer dusk

when the long hot day’s distilling

means the garden’s only roses, roses –

most beautiful with your eyes closed,

shut against the tumbled

brickwork and the weeds –

but soon it will be dark

and from the high, thin squeaks

you’ll know they’re bats,

as the stars’ spores

swell, promising more,

poking their green-white light

through the black soil of the sky.

Into the Wild

Rare flower seekers

found his car, a hulk

of desert metal,

all his burnt cash petals

long since blown.

Moose hunters in Alaska

found the magic bus:

Tolstoy, Pasternak, Thoreau,

his Taina plant lore book

and, shrunk to a husk,

Alexander Supertramp,

his lonely trail blazed back

into himself. And seared

on the undeveloped reel,

pre-image of a soul.

These traces that we leave

of all we’ve saved or slain.

Beautiful blueberries,

seed, moose, river, stone –

the things we’ve known

and sometimes rightly named.

The Parliament of Gulls

Fresh on the shingle,

the upturned seagull-

gutted baby sharks,

eye sockets scooped-out

holes in sheeted flesh,

a spectral gathering

of Ku Klux fish.

Sated, a sarky

seagull parliament’s

in session on the beach:

the speaker struts

and scoffs, a preachy

scavenger. Nearby

we plunder pebbles

from the rattling strand,

our pockets filled

with mottled planets

and a cock-eyed Earth

cupped in my open hand.

Postcard from the Colonies

Long-faced monkey, Malcolm Rifkind-like,

stares straight, slightly dismayed –

or else that look’s caught-in-the-act-

ing innocent, clutching a heavy-bottomed russet pear

purloined from higher up the knotty cross-hatched tree.

Past his left shoulder stands Khartoum.

The Libyan Desert rests above his (left-side) middle-parted

hair and to the right, Jerma, Mourzouk,

and (capitalized) FEZZAN.

French Congo’s cradled by his armpit

(all those dotted lines could be the tracks of fleas)

and on his lap, a jutting yellow flash, Boma.

The mouths of rivers bristle, curving from his forearms’ fur.

His bum’s on Bemba, back to Lake Victoria

and, higher up, the Nile twists down into his spine,

a rippling cord, wired off the map –

perhaps that look’s electric shock

and he has something to confess to us?

And his companion, stooping low

over Kaffraria, on hands and knees,

what is he reaching for, or retching at?

The Portuguese have stamped this snatch