Poetry review – FANCY THAT AND OTHER POEMS: Chris Beckett clearly enjoys the light-hearted sexual frankness in John Dixon’s poems but finds serious insights as well
Fancy That and other poems
John Dixon
Paradise Press
ISBN 978 1 90 458579 4
78pp £7.00
After a series of poems both in the poet’s and a mother’s voice which enact the often fractured, tentative relations between gay child and straight parents (‘their ways defeat me’, is the rueful admission in “Visiting parents”), a routine trip to the barber supplies a refrain which feels to me like the coming-out anthem for this whole collection:
Why hide it, sir
Why not make a feature of it?
The barber asks about a receding hairline, and suddenly this becomes a life lesson, a motto that the grown-up poet wears like a badge of his identity and pride, suffusing the subsequent poems with openness, sensuality, cheek and humour. I especially like how Dixon takes the often sedate little haiku form and busts it wide open with a saucy quip:
Squeezing the empty
toothpaste tube I think of yours.
Pearl on a piss-slit
He uses laughter to normalise gay sex (well, it’s only sex after all…!) as in “Polite request
Talk me through
a telephone wank…
and also in the delightfully filthy poem about a farm boy (“Untitlted”) ‘slithering his cock…into me’, not to mention my favourite naughtiness which is the title poem “Fancy that” about the boy he used to tickle under the chin who is now the man he tickles under the balls:
Ah, Time! Ah, Change!
Same finger action.
Under these compact colloquial and often amusing lines runs a serious wisdom. In its later stages the book returns to previous generations, dealing with carriage boys disposing of horse-shit; Oscar Wilde saying ‘do not let it happen again’; the Italian shepherd bringing his river of sheep through the town before returning to the hills; and finally facing the Herculean task of trying to put right all the past misconceptions about homosexuality (“Gay archives”). And this last is what Dixon’s poems, in their modestly slanting way, set themselves to perform. And of course sex is only one strand of this physicality, only one arguably small part of the equation, while love or just being there for someone is the larger truth:
I cradle a grown man
fully vulnerable
fitfully snoring off his latest hurt.
Details withheld.
Just help him through.
No questions asked.
The gist of this crisis
will filter out
when the next grief comes along.
(“Resolution”)
Another reviewer, V.G.Lee, whose comments appear on the inside leaf of the book, feels he is in the company of an articulate, witty and wise friend, happy to share his thoughts and experiences. Still another, Peter Scott-Presland, talks of Dixon’s wryness as a gay man of a certain age and wide experience, but also highlights his tenderness, the sense that Dixon empathises fully with all the characters he draws and the voices he speaks in, even though they come from a wide range of historical, societal and intensely personal registers.
Fancy That is an important addition to the Paradise Press list put out by Gay Authors Workshop (GAW), which was originally founded in 1973 as an offshoot of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) by Michael Harth and others. Recent books include Leigh V Twersky’s novel Olympia Heights, and Lost Places an LGBT Anthology, which is a fascinating series of descriptions and recollections of prominent London gay spaces from pubs to cottages and heaths, by a variety of GAW members and edited by Jeffrey Doorn. The full list is viewable on GAW’s website.
May 14 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – John Dixon
Poetry review – FANCY THAT AND OTHER POEMS: Chris Beckett clearly enjoys the light-hearted sexual frankness in John Dixon’s poems but finds serious insights as well
After a series of poems both in the poet’s and a mother’s voice which enact the often fractured, tentative relations between gay child and straight parents (‘their ways defeat me’, is the rueful admission in “Visiting parents”), a routine trip to the barber supplies a refrain which feels to me like the coming-out anthem for this whole collection:
The barber asks about a receding hairline, and suddenly this becomes a life lesson, a motto that the grown-up poet wears like a badge of his identity and pride, suffusing the subsequent poems with openness, sensuality, cheek and humour. I especially like how Dixon takes the often sedate little haiku form and busts it wide open with a saucy quip:
Squeezing the empty toothpaste tube I think of yours. Pearl on a piss-slitHe uses laughter to normalise gay sex (well, it’s only sex after all…!) as in “Polite request
and also in the delightfully filthy poem about a farm boy (“Untitlted”) ‘slithering his cock…into me’, not to mention my favourite naughtiness which is the title poem “Fancy that” about the boy he used to tickle under the chin who is now the man he tickles under the balls:
Under these compact colloquial and often amusing lines runs a serious wisdom. In its later stages the book returns to previous generations, dealing with carriage boys disposing of horse-shit; Oscar Wilde saying ‘do not let it happen again’; the Italian shepherd bringing his river of sheep through the town before returning to the hills; and finally facing the Herculean task of trying to put right all the past misconceptions about homosexuality (“Gay archives”). And this last is what Dixon’s poems, in their modestly slanting way, set themselves to perform. And of course sex is only one strand of this physicality, only one arguably small part of the equation, while love or just being there for someone is the larger truth:
I cradle a grown man fully vulnerable fitfully snoring off his latest hurt. Details withheld. Just help him through. No questions asked. The gist of this crisis will filter out when the next grief comes along. (“Resolution”)Another reviewer, V.G.Lee, whose comments appear on the inside leaf of the book, feels he is in the company of an articulate, witty and wise friend, happy to share his thoughts and experiences. Still another, Peter Scott-Presland, talks of Dixon’s wryness as a gay man of a certain age and wide experience, but also highlights his tenderness, the sense that Dixon empathises fully with all the characters he draws and the voices he speaks in, even though they come from a wide range of historical, societal and intensely personal registers.
Fancy That is an important addition to the Paradise Press list put out by Gay Authors Workshop (GAW), which was originally founded in 1973 as an offshoot of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) by Michael Harth and others. Recent books include Leigh V Twersky’s novel Olympia Heights, and Lost Places an LGBT Anthology, which is a fascinating series of descriptions and recollections of prominent London gay spaces from pubs to cottages and heaths, by a variety of GAW members and edited by Jeffrey Doorn. The full list is viewable on GAW’s website.