Overview

From the prizewinning poet, a tender, nostalgic and dryly witty collection that celebrates the companionship of marriage, the small joys of growing old, and the ever-illuminating beauty of the English countryside A walk is like a knot that gets undone, And yet it keeps us closer. In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet's wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality. Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime's understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our path- 'Can you tell / Me / Something of love?'

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9781784746544

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Reviews

'The title poem of John Fuller’s new collection is a corona, a sonnet sequence enlivened by tough formal rules. His is a magnificent and tender celebration of long love and of abundant nature, and is a deep meditation on mortality. It’s also technically brilliant and playful. This volume shows all his strengths. The poetry has a luminous clarity. The poet takes an easy pleasure in form. Death lurks but humour and sensuousness prevail. The purpose behind his painterly gaze is ‘to write/ The lines and colours that embody light.’ The business, as Conrad might have said, is to make us see. Above all, perhaps, the reader has a sense of a lifetime’s stored wisdom wryly conveyed' * Ian McEwan, author of What We Can Know *

Author Information

John Fuller, born in Ashford, Kent, is an acclaimed poet and novelist. His collection Stones and Fires (1996) was awarded the Forward Prize; Ghosts (2004) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Poetry; The Space of Joy (2006) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and The Grey Among the Green (1988), Song & Dance (2008) and Pebble & I (2010) were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His 1983 novel Flying to Nowhere won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written collections of short stories and several books for children. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

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