Book description
John Fuller is one of the most accomplished, prolific and popular of
contemporary poets. His Collected Poems brings together most of
his poems, from his first collection, Fairground Music (1961)
to Stones and Fires (winner of the 1996 Forward Poetry Prize),
and enables us to appreciate the full extent of his remarkable
talents. From his strikingly assured early poems - dramatic monologues
and playful rewritings of myth and fairytale - to his more complex,
discursive later work, Fuller displays his virtuosity with a wide
variety of subjects, moods and forms.
Here are fantasies, poems about nature, riddles and nonsense poems;
tender love poems and philosophical meditations; sombre, wistful
sonnets and the lightest, most charming songs. But there are
consistent themes: romantic love, a potent sense of the physical
world, and a constant shifting between exuberant irreverence and the
yearning for moral and metaphysical truths. Throughout, the poems are
steeped in humour and learning, and display Fuller's easy command of
the of the whole scope and richness of the English language.
John Fuller is an acclaimed poet and novelist, author of fourteen
volumes of poems and several works of fiction. His 1996 collection,
Stones and Fires
, won the Forward Poetry Prize. His novel,
Flying to Nowhere
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award. He is
a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
