A Fold in the Map

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. The first part, ‘Plenty’, deals with family, and a yearning view of home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s moving second half, ‘Meet My Father’, we encounter events more life-changing than merely moving abroad - a father’s illness and death, the loss of that earlier plenty.

The title A Fold in the Map is a nod to a phrase in Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, which describes the traveller’s state of in-betweenness. In these poems of love and longing for home, family, and other loved ones, Isobel Dixon draws on a store of sensuous natural imagery, illuminating the ordinary, often with a touch of wry humour. Her accessible contemporary lyricism will speak memorably to those who have travelled, loved and lost.