Join us in celebrating the life and work of Edward Thomas at the Edward Thomas Literary Festival 2024.
Join poet Isobel Dixon and artist Douglas Robertson for a lively poetry-art workshop inspired by nature and nature-loving creators over the centuries. Over the course of two-hour workshop there will be chance to listen, reflect, engage in conversation and turn your own hand to some writing, drawing and/or making. Writers and artists of all abilities are welcome!
Isobel will read some poems from her vivid new collection A Whistling of Birds, which includes 12 beautiful nature illustrations by Douglas Robertson. Isobel will also share a new poem inspired by Edward Thomas, with insights into Isobel and Douglas’ own creative practice and their long-running art-poetry collaboration. There will be time in the session to experiment with word and image through making and drawing that will spark closer observation and enrich participant’s creativity.
Participants may want to bring a notebook and a pencil/pen, but art materials will be provided.
A Whistling of Birds
Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, A Whistling of Birds shares points of creative contact with D.H. Lawrence’s iconic collection of nature poetry, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers, artists and musicians – from Emily Dickinson to Ted Hughes, Albrecht Dürer to Georgia O’Keeffe, in moments closely examined and delicately drawn.
Syrian roses, an abundance of apricots in Santa Fe; bats, bees, tortoises, snakes, the generous body of a whale. Also, of course, birds and birdsong, as show in several titles: ‘Rosenberg’s Larks’, ‘The Woburn Robin’ and ‘Bede’s Sparrow’ (the last with a fine accompanying drawing by Doug). Threaded throughout is the beautiful complexity and vulnerability of the planet, and the joy and difficulty of making art, also in times of war and displacement.
An exhibition of Doug’s work linked to A Whistling of Birds is on display during the festival at Gallery No. 30 in the High Street in Petersfield.
See more about A Whistling of Birds here.
Praise for A Whistling of Birds:
‘In Isobel Dixon’s A Whistling of Birds she gets, and shares with her readers, new slants on life on earth…. This book gives shocks of pleasure and gratitude in equal measure.’ – David Constantine
‘These are warm, attentive, moving poems, full of feeling but also full of precision and clarity of mind. Isobel Dixon’s work is engaged not just with life, but with poetry as life, and this haunting book is a testament to the doubleness of the poetic art: an engagement with the world, and a world in and of itself’ – Patrick McGuinness
‘Isobel Dixon’s writing is lit by a fierce sense of landscape. … Her work is visually exuberant; its sounds, delicious, especially when bound by rhyme. Dixon’s lines flash with humour and tenderness. Her poems marry exactitude to emotion. In both, they are memorable.’ – Alison Brackenbury
About the Poet
Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, where her debut, Weather Eye, won the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize. Her further collections are A Fold in The Map, Bearings and The Tempest Prognosticator, which J.M. Coetzee described as ‘a virtuoso collection’. A Whistling of Birds contains 12 illustrations by Douglas Robertson. The collection’s title echoes Lawrence’s World War I essay ‘Whistling of Birds’, and there are poems that speak directly to aspects of Lawrence’s life and nature writing, but Dixon’s gaze ranges more widely across continents, centuries and creators. Isobel and Doug will have an exhibition and discussion about their response to D.H. Lawrence’s work at the National Poetry Library at London’s Southbank Centre later in October.
See Isobel Dixon’s website here.
About the Artist
Douglas Robertson is an acclaimed Scottish artist, well known for his collaborations with poets. His main collaborators over the last decade have been Isobel Dixon and Donald S. Murray. His collaborations with Murray, The Guga Stone and Herring Tales, were included in The Guardian’s Best Nature Books of 2013 and 2015. In 2020 his assemblage piece Emigrants – Wake won second prize at the Southampton City Art Gallery Biennial Open Exhibition, In Search of a New World.
See Douglas Robertson’s website here.
Workshop Supported Places
Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery wants to encourage and support everyone to be creative and access their creative workshops. Thanks to the support and funding from Arts Council England, we are able to offer a limited number of partial and full bursaries to this workshop for those with limited or no financial income. For more details, please contact Ryan Watts, education@petersfieldmuseum.co.uk.
