The tempest prognosticator - Isobel Dixon

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 Cape Town to Nagasaki, the Congo to the Karoo, creatures real and surreal flit, and peck and spin fantastic webs across the page. In this finely-spun collection real-life explorers Robert Byron and Mary Kingsley have encounters both dangerous and humorous, we venture inside Alfred Hitchcock's ominous Psycho house, and find Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked on the moon. Desire and loss are refracted through the writings of naturalist-poet Eugene Marais and Shakespeare, through the art of Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois and Henri Rousseau, through Pink Floyd's music and Fred Astaire's footwork, and with each page of this 'ingenious carousel' a poet's vision of a world of art and nature emerges - stormy, celebratory, revelatory. This is a collection filled with 'miracle and wonder', wit and bite, a generous feast of words.