Isobel Dixon

The first poems I wrote were about drought – a familiar condition to a child growing up in South Africa’s semi-desert landscape of the Great Karoo region. Poems in my first published collections Weather Eye and A Fold in the Map speak of heat, and water – and the lack of it. My sisters and I (five girls, all told) ran wild with our cousins over holidays on our uncle’s farm, as he and our mother and their younger siblings (in full, a band of six) must have done when they were young. Hard chores to complete every day, but we had space for play, close to the tree roots and branches, the stones and the blades of grass and the ants. Bird’s- and snail’s-eye views.

I have always written about the creatures too – the birds and insects and beasts that were part of our lives. Much younger than my three close-born older sisters, I was often left to my own quiet devices. Not lonely though: the critters were my friends, and words and verse fill any magnitude of space and time.  Or so it seems to me now, looking down memory’s avenue at the girl making up her own games in the orchard by the house where the orphan lambs (the hanslammertjies) were kept – the orchard in the poem “The Secret Peach.” The old woman in the poem, lost for words in a foreign land, could be one of my mother’s dear sisters. All departed, all still very near.

At first, I thought the two poems here in Plant-Human Quarterly – “The Secret Peach” and “Whereas at Venice” – were not that closely related – poems written many years apart, though both collected in A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches, 2023). Then I realized that along with the peach trees on that patch of farmland stood a cluster of pomegranate trees. Strong, stubby, shrubby trees, bearing magical fruit. I had tried to write a poem about pomegranates and family for decades, without success. But the pomegranates smuggled themselves into their own poem, “Whereas at Venice,” via D.H. Lawrence and echoes from his poem “Pomegranate.” This was the first poem in his 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which became a touchstone for the making of A Whistling of Birds. Along with my poems, the making included twelve beautifully detailed drawings by Scottish nature artist Douglas Robertson, our own birds, beasts and flowers book.

The voice and tone of the two poems is very different, and now I hear different voices within the lines of each. Different shapers and makers and namers leaving their mark. Crack open the pomegranate, split the peach – domestic and disruptive, I see a new map of that scrappy little orchard now, catch the scent of its slow-ripening fruit.