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.