DH Lawrence Celebration

Hailed as a precursor of modernism, DH Lawrence was best known for such notorious novels as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but he was also a prolific poet.

Hear his words read live, along with a brand new artistic response to Lawrence from poet Isobel Dixon and artist Douglas Robertson.

The pair worked together on the 2023 publication A Whistling of Birds, Dixon’s striking poetry collection responding to nature writers and artists through the ages – including Lawrence – with illustrations by Robertson.

A Whistling of Birds shares points of creative contact with Lawrence’s iconic collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which had its 100th anniversary in 2023.

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 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 JM Coetzee described as ‘a virtuoso collection’. A Whistling of Birds contains 12 illustrations by Douglas Robertson.

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.