Poetry review – THE LEFT-HANDED SNIPER: John Forth commends Alan Dixon’s ability to be outrageously funny while never losing sight of the possible presence of tragedy
The Left-Handed Sniper
Alan Dixon
Shoestring Press
ISBN 9 7871915 553508
72pp £10.00
Were he not so relentlessly European, Alan Dixon might be found somewhere between Alan Bennett and Edward Lear for his tone, wit and self-portraits. Instead we must search among latter-day Dadaists or Surrealists and, for his poems, French Symbolists. A key appears to be hidden in a complete poem towards the end of his latest book:
Let us play a different way, he said.
Let the ladders go down and the snakes go up.
Let us draw the heads where tails have been.
Will the game still come to an end? she said
or keep returning to where it began?
Let us argue over each throw of the dice.
That would be a cock-eyed thing to do,
But a slippery game could be improved.
Let us hope that neither of us can win.
(“Ladders and Snakes”)
We’d never want to argue over each throw, of course. That would be a cockeyed thing to do. So we follow the voices through lists, games, esoteric word-play such as ‘the umpteen options of William Empathy’ (“Encounters with the Great”) and even something a little like Edward Lear:
Walking to Firle
We hope to meet Firly,
A friendly curly
Bedlington
or Bedlington nearly..
(“Nosy About Firly”)
It raises a smile, as will an explicit Lear parody: ‘How pleasant to know Mr. Lucas’ (“The Bard of Shoestring-on-Trent”) and a remarkable tribute in a one sentence sonnet (“Since Melody Died”) that mimics the tone of gossip at a crowded funeral. There’s a comic (or nonsensical?) suite about beards and hats that is better read than quoted, although the final stanza concerning a son’s dispute with his father about a bowler might stand alone:
And he could not feel right in
The bowler – so he thought;
And for that kind of thinking
My head was far too short.
(“The Bowler”)
Twenty-one of the poems in The Left-Handed Sniper appear as ‘imitations’, written ‘after’ works by several European poets. Nearly half of these are attributed to Max Jacob, famously credited with being influential in reshaping the new poetry. Dixon wears these hats, and a few more, equally comfortably. If he’s doing the police in different voices, as someone else once did, then apparently disparate ideas yoked together by violence (to misquote Dr Johnson) appear more manageable and we’re able to relax a little. The late Paul McLoughlin’s London Grip review of his previous book, The Wall Dancer, is an excellent guide to the influences, and is well worth looking up.
The Left-Handed Sniper contains poems rather than the art for which Dixon has become famous, so you’d think we might do worse than look for a woodcutter among the poems, though he insists in an interview for Happenstance Press that there was never any interplay between his own poems and his wood-cuts. Either way, the title poem doesn’t disappoint – full as it is with jagged edges and surprising images – conveying the tale of wheel-chaired First World War veteran, Joe Pears:
Back home his body locked into two tight angles,
His head to eyes front: mud ice and puddles,
Trench feet and a shell fragment.
What follows might be the nearest Dixon comes to childhood anecdote (Joe is said to be ‘uncle’s friend’) but the narrative ends with a jolt when the boy and Joe Pears go for a spin to the pub:
Did he hear rifle-fire in the dominoes’ rattle?
He probably wasn’t my dad but I sometimes wonder.
The fact that we hear not the ‘rapid rattle’ of rifles but of dominoes signals a habit of snatching surprise from the expected. The aim is always to be, as the poem tells us, ‘a good sniper with the right-handed rifle’, to master a thing even if (or especially if) it’s not made for you and you don’t quite fit. You might even wonder if Joe and his rifle might be another strange fiction, though it wouldn’t matter if they were not. There is, anyhow, a thread of Army or Services life throughout, extending as far as Max Jacob’s “The Conscript of Landudec”.
There are two standout poems referring to Malcolm Lowry, the first to his grave at Ripe in Sussex, where the title and last line in Spanish translate as ‘Do you like this garden? Stop your kids from destroying it!’ We’re told that ‘the ceramic plaque still leans half hidden’ – maybe an emblem for whatever survives an author. No Fiddler of Dooney here, but there is a kind of Yeatsian masque in the second poem:
He sang to her to the pluck and the scratch
Of the twonking strings of his taropatch
As the goldeneye swam out to sea
And the fog got into his wounded knee
Or in the White House kitchen at Ripe
He stuffed his baccynalian pipe.
(“A Song for Malcolm Lowry’s Uke”)
We know that ‘the good are always the merry’ after all, and we’re reminded here that you’ll find no sentiment unless leavened by comedy. Another pose is introduced in “The Mask” (after Valery Larbaud) in which we learn that ‘my face is a mask whenever I write’ and from which we guess that the book might now take us anywhere. At first the Europeans appear spasmodically, but after Max Jacob’s introduction the avant-garde is out in force. In “Sprinkled Earth” we hear of a contrast in dawn and night mists, the latter being a precursor to what the dawn ‘hides’: ‘When I think about poetry in the night / I cannot sleep’ and words (‘a miraculous birth / of the sprinkled earth’) ‘do not disappear too soon’. Some unraveling is going on, of both subject and object.
Two contrasting ‘creature’ poems present a real goat (“The Captive”) and a metaphorical wolf (“The Wolf” after Lorinc Szabo). In the first (a sonnet) ‘we’ are present but incidental, and the goat is clearly real but with symbolic potential:
We step from rocky slopes where he should be.
Tonguing a nettle in reach he makes us note
His lumpy horns…
(“The Captive”)
The situation seems on a knife edge in the sense that ‘we’ are there to make a home and the animal is poised for ‘the break’ or escape. In the Szabo poem the wolf is a constant but shifting presence emanating initially from fairy tales but taking shape as the day proceeds:
….It lay in wait
for me to become over-confident…
the silent siege of its presence had to be borne
through many nights and tortured me till dawn.
(“The Wolf)
Here in a place of metaphors the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ appear fundamental whereas the animal is part-shadow, poised to become real. In the poems toward the end of the book these distinctions are constantly shifting and sometimes may not have much significance at all. The last twenty or so kick off with “The Gasman’s Position” which plays with the larger-than-life memory of a man perched on top of a gasometer:
The ometer was full of gas
And the man had plenty of piss
And two of us and maybe three
Could entertain the ambition
To piss from that lofty position.
Once again the ordinary is being made into something very strange and as in the title poem there is a tilted autobiography in a deliberately odd or quaint apocryphal tale of ‘little me’. Other decorated memories adorn “Grand Days”, “Cheapest Barber in Town”, “Cary Moonbeam” and “A Protest”, the last of which presents a toilet attendant using paint to make the best of a bad show. Matthew Sweeney used to say that unless you could find reasons why something couldn’t happen it’s safer to assume that it did. In any case Dixon seems determined to have a kind of last laugh:
When I think about kicking the bucket –
….no rubbish to muffle the clang and clutter to dint it,
The bucket, no fusspot, not to expect it
In the chatter and barking and laughter and traffic.
(“The Death of Dicko”)
The squib that preceded the title poem at the start of the book shows the poet addressing his own works as ‘importunate lightweights’ with ‘irritating manners’ and a ‘lack of gravity’, but the real surprise comes in an apparently self-deprecating whisper at the poem’s end:
Why don’t you write a proper book?
We took for friendly comment
From one who had imagined
The faint possibility
(“My Upstarts”)
It’s easier to offer a hostage to fortune if no one’s there to be handed over. This grand orchestration of masks eventually resembles the familiar ‘escape from personality’ we heard so much about in the last century, which is after all where Dixon spent his first 64 years. As we shuffle on into the twenty-first he is sometimes outrageously funny but always with at least one eye kept open on the tragic and ugly. This may or may not be ‘a proper book’, but it’s a book to grow into as you stumble upon more of its secrets.
Apr 23 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Dixon
Poetry review – THE LEFT-HANDED SNIPER: John Forth commends Alan Dixon’s ability to be outrageously funny while never losing sight of the possible presence of tragedy
Were he not so relentlessly European, Alan Dixon might be found somewhere between Alan Bennett and Edward Lear for his tone, wit and self-portraits. Instead we must search among latter-day Dadaists or Surrealists and, for his poems, French Symbolists. A key appears to be hidden in a complete poem towards the end of his latest book:
Let us play a different way, he said. Let the ladders go down and the snakes go up. Let us draw the heads where tails have been. Will the game still come to an end? she said or keep returning to where it began? Let us argue over each throw of the dice. That would be a cock-eyed thing to do, But a slippery game could be improved. Let us hope that neither of us can win. (“Ladders and Snakes”)We’d never want to argue over each throw, of course. That would be a cockeyed thing to do. So we follow the voices through lists, games, esoteric word-play such as ‘the umpteen options of William Empathy’ (“Encounters with the Great”) and even something a little like Edward Lear:
Walking to Firle We hope to meet Firly, A friendly curly Bedlington or Bedlington nearly.. (“Nosy About Firly”)It raises a smile, as will an explicit Lear parody: ‘How pleasant to know Mr. Lucas’ (“The Bard of Shoestring-on-Trent”) and a remarkable tribute in a one sentence sonnet (“Since Melody Died”) that mimics the tone of gossip at a crowded funeral. There’s a comic (or nonsensical?) suite about beards and hats that is better read than quoted, although the final stanza concerning a son’s dispute with his father about a bowler might stand alone:
And he could not feel right in The bowler – so he thought; And for that kind of thinking My head was far too short. (“The Bowler”)Twenty-one of the poems in The Left-Handed Sniper appear as ‘imitations’, written ‘after’ works by several European poets. Nearly half of these are attributed to Max Jacob, famously credited with being influential in reshaping the new poetry. Dixon wears these hats, and a few more, equally comfortably. If he’s doing the police in different voices, as someone else once did, then apparently disparate ideas yoked together by violence (to misquote Dr Johnson) appear more manageable and we’re able to relax a little. The late Paul McLoughlin’s London Grip review of his previous book, The Wall Dancer, is an excellent guide to the influences, and is well worth looking up.
The Left-Handed Sniper contains poems rather than the art for which Dixon has become famous, so you’d think we might do worse than look for a woodcutter among the poems, though he insists in an interview for Happenstance Press that there was never any interplay between his own poems and his wood-cuts. Either way, the title poem doesn’t disappoint – full as it is with jagged edges and surprising images – conveying the tale of wheel-chaired First World War veteran, Joe Pears:
What follows might be the nearest Dixon comes to childhood anecdote (Joe is said to be ‘uncle’s friend’) but the narrative ends with a jolt when the boy and Joe Pears go for a spin to the pub:
The fact that we hear not the ‘rapid rattle’ of rifles but of dominoes signals a habit of snatching surprise from the expected. The aim is always to be, as the poem tells us, ‘a good sniper with the right-handed rifle’, to master a thing even if (or especially if) it’s not made for you and you don’t quite fit. You might even wonder if Joe and his rifle might be another strange fiction, though it wouldn’t matter if they were not. There is, anyhow, a thread of Army or Services life throughout, extending as far as Max Jacob’s “The Conscript of Landudec”.
There are two standout poems referring to Malcolm Lowry, the first to his grave at Ripe in Sussex, where the title and last line in Spanish translate as ‘Do you like this garden? Stop your kids from destroying it!’ We’re told that ‘the ceramic plaque still leans half hidden’ – maybe an emblem for whatever survives an author. No Fiddler of Dooney here, but there is a kind of Yeatsian masque in the second poem:
He sang to her to the pluck and the scratch Of the twonking strings of his taropatch As the goldeneye swam out to sea And the fog got into his wounded knee Or in the White House kitchen at Ripe He stuffed his baccynalian pipe. (“A Song for Malcolm Lowry’s Uke”)We know that ‘the good are always the merry’ after all, and we’re reminded here that you’ll find no sentiment unless leavened by comedy. Another pose is introduced in “The Mask” (after Valery Larbaud) in which we learn that ‘my face is a mask whenever I write’ and from which we guess that the book might now take us anywhere. At first the Europeans appear spasmodically, but after Max Jacob’s introduction the avant-garde is out in force. In “Sprinkled Earth” we hear of a contrast in dawn and night mists, the latter being a precursor to what the dawn ‘hides’: ‘When I think about poetry in the night / I cannot sleep’ and words (‘a miraculous birth / of the sprinkled earth’) ‘do not disappear too soon’. Some unraveling is going on, of both subject and object.
Two contrasting ‘creature’ poems present a real goat (“The Captive”) and a metaphorical wolf (“The Wolf” after Lorinc Szabo). In the first (a sonnet) ‘we’ are present but incidental, and the goat is clearly real but with symbolic potential:
We step from rocky slopes where he should be. Tonguing a nettle in reach he makes us note His lumpy horns… (“The Captive”)The situation seems on a knife edge in the sense that ‘we’ are there to make a home and the animal is poised for ‘the break’ or escape. In the Szabo poem the wolf is a constant but shifting presence emanating initially from fairy tales but taking shape as the day proceeds:
….It lay in wait for me to become over-confident… the silent siege of its presence had to be borne through many nights and tortured me till dawn. (“The Wolf)Here in a place of metaphors the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ appear fundamental whereas the animal is part-shadow, poised to become real. In the poems toward the end of the book these distinctions are constantly shifting and sometimes may not have much significance at all. The last twenty or so kick off with “The Gasman’s Position” which plays with the larger-than-life memory of a man perched on top of a gasometer:
Once again the ordinary is being made into something very strange and as in the title poem there is a tilted autobiography in a deliberately odd or quaint apocryphal tale of ‘little me’. Other decorated memories adorn “Grand Days”, “Cheapest Barber in Town”, “Cary Moonbeam” and “A Protest”, the last of which presents a toilet attendant using paint to make the best of a bad show. Matthew Sweeney used to say that unless you could find reasons why something couldn’t happen it’s safer to assume that it did. In any case Dixon seems determined to have a kind of last laugh:
When I think about kicking the bucket – ….no rubbish to muffle the clang and clutter to dint it, The bucket, no fusspot, not to expect it In the chatter and barking and laughter and traffic. (“The Death of Dicko”)The squib that preceded the title poem at the start of the book shows the poet addressing his own works as ‘importunate lightweights’ with ‘irritating manners’ and a ‘lack of gravity’, but the real surprise comes in an apparently self-deprecating whisper at the poem’s end:
Why don’t you write a proper book? We took for friendly comment From one who had imagined The faint possibility (“My Upstarts”)It’s easier to offer a hostage to fortune if no one’s there to be handed over. This grand orchestration of masks eventually resembles the familiar ‘escape from personality’ we heard so much about in the last century, which is after all where Dixon spent his first 64 years. As we shuffle on into the twenty-first he is sometimes outrageously funny but always with at least one eye kept open on the tragic and ugly. This may or may not be ‘a proper book’, but it’s a book to grow into as you stumble upon more of its secrets.