Book description
From his first wartime collection evoking a generation's experience
of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the vivid
allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar', to the consolatory wisdom of
the Last Poems of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poet of the familiar and
ordinary made extraordinary. Mundane details, observed with Fuller's
tolerant humour and acute eye, reveal depths and dissonances from
which a civilised life may be created: the unremarkable year of
painting the shed ... Is also that of harmonies / That have made one's
life and art for evermore off-key'. On the centenary of Fuller's
birth, this generous selection, introduced by John Fuller, the poet's
son, and with an afterword by Neil Powell, Fuller's biographer, brings
to a new generation of readers the work of one of the essential
twentieth-century poets. With an afterword by Neil Powell.
'From this judicious selection it becomes clear that he survives as a
considerable figure. His recent comparative neglect is understandable as
part of the process of sifting - and he would surely have expected it -
but here is the opportunity to see what an impressive and memorable body
of work has temporarily been missing from the picture.' Sean O'Brien,
The Guardian 3 March 2012
