Song and Dance

Song & Dance
By John Fuller
Chatto & Windus £9, 73 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.20

In the notes to Song & Dance, John Fuller’s latest collection of light verse, he explains that most of the poems were first performed for the John Florio Society of Magdalen College, Oxford. This poetry club has a pedigree quite unlike any other; past alumni include Alan Hollinghurst, Pico Iyer and Mick Imlah. Like all societies, however, it seems to be a pretext for carrousing as much as anything else: Fuller’s celebrations of literary lives, drunken nights and dadaist dances rattles along with good humour.

But the bawdy veneer is matched by immense skill, witnessed in the throwaway joys of A Dozen Victorian Autograms. In this series Fuller claims to create a new poetic form, whereby another poet’s work is imitated using only the letters in their name (“O I am atman, I am alma in Latin, I am all anima”, for Walt Whitman). Amid the playfulness, however, Fuller touches on true moments of pathos, the pain that follows most singing and dancing.