Waving At Trains
Poetry
By John Dickson

What attracts us first to the poetry of John Dickson is its warmth and humanity, a passionate and amused concern that embraces the whole range of our experience. Here are poems about babies, the newborn "enemy" that will take over our world and yet can disarm us with a smile, or about the loss of friends in a world with "so much death going around." In between, in great variety but no sameness, are a child's experience of eviction, young love at the Aragon Ballroom, the commodities market, a gall bladder operation, the cat next door that has the eyes of a lost girlfriend, or life class in an art school. Yet the sympathy never spills over into indescriminate enthusiasm, love and the other emotions are seen with a sharp satiric eye, with irony and humor and a sense of our human folly. Mr. Dickson keeps surprising us, as good poetry always does; shows us the family at its lavish table "waiting for yesterday" or voices a city dwellers's complaints about the difficulty of sleeping in the distracting silence of the country. His point of view is always fresh and his own; one of the most original poems is a love story told in reverse, like a film run backwards. But great as teh range of tones and subjects is, we feel the one very individual voice that unifies them all. This is the story of a human life.

                    - John Frederick Nims