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Poem Of The Week: River Mother By Isobel Dixon

River Mother

O the sideways fullness of crab

heavy chassis
low-slung on the riverbed
she is a teeming mass

clawed boat
tip her a bit
to spot the freight

her pouch clutched pearls
and now she seethes
with crablets of tininess

writhing spiderlings
little sparkles
in a battered jewel case

rich crustacean mama
multiply blessed

Potamonautes perlatus
Madonna multitudinous

you are an overflowing chitin purse

Anyone familiar with the work of Isabel Galleymore will recognise in ‘River Mother’ an unusually palpable sense of verisimilitude. For here, in Attenborough-esque close-up, a crab, camouflaged in startling metaphor, is revealed in an otherwise static underwater tableau. Isobel Dixon’s great gift lies in the act of apprehension: investing the crustacean with power, fecundity and purpose, her poem is a paean, an obeisant delve into the kingdom of an armour protected ‘mother’, whose ‘jewel case’ of tiny spiderlings is her guarantor of teeming organic continuity.

Using the language of homage – Dixon’s superlatives are legion – the poet/narrator cloaks the Cape river crab with a golden carapace in a joyous celebration of figurative possibility, not undermined by the alliterative panache of its Latin name, or the hyperbolic fulsomeness of the poet’s subsequent praise. And a refulgent reminder, if one were needed, of what we might one day lose.

‘River Mother’ is taken from A Whistling of Birds, published by Nine Arches Press (2023)

More information here.

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