Poems from London Magazine, LRB, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Review, TLS etc. There are 3 long poems. I have problem with long poems, but I liked "History" once I tuned into its pacing - "And pondering yourself the puzzle of how we come/ Through all the undetonated chances and mistakes,/ Following the mothballed flag of our assumptions". There are longuers (e.g. a stanza which points out things that happen only once may as a consequence be trivial or especially significant). There's nothing new in "the sense/ Of how we must salvage everything that we can/ From the tide that casts us up on the shore of our lives/ At every moment, wave upon wave upon wave", but there's enough poetry at a small and large scale to succeed. "Europe" follows, 22 Petrachean sonnets which I liked less.
The shorter poems vary in tone and quality. "First Day" includes "The babble of the sap/ As it begins to seep./ The autumn orchard's chorus/ Of thudding apples.// Then came a deeper sound/ Running through time, like sand/ Invisible in glass,/ But pounding, pounding" which is flat compared to the later "Song is the pain of change,/ Song is the body's hinge/ When the whole future widens/ As window or angel.// Til what you have become/ Tells you from where you came,/ Your heart-beat loosened from/ The earth's drumming". I didn't get "Logical Exercises". I didn't like "Shape". "Barbed Wire Blue" was fun. "A Cuclshoc" (shuttlecock) worked from me. "Edward Lear in Corsica" is light verse pastiche. "Canicule Macaronique" (a French/English mix) didn't tickle my funny bone.
After all that I was looking forward to the final long poem, "Star-gazing", about stars and his dead father, but it didn't move me. The rhyming emphasizes the weak parts
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And if we wake up in the night, We easily feel flabbergasted: Our dreams had such vast scope, despite Our knowing that it must have lasted No longer than a meteorite. ... No pattern there, except in death, The stubborn drawing of a breath After breath after breath that perseveres For all of our allotted years, The sixtieth, seventieth, eightieth. |
A book well worth reading all the same.
Other reviews
- Fuller's 1996 collection Stones and Fires stands out from the rest of his oeuvre for its very unwhimsical portrayal of grief at the death of his father, in poems like "The Garden", "Star-Gazing" and the marvellous "A Cuclshoc" (David Wheatley)
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