"Stones & Fires" by John Fuller (Chatto, 1996)

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

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)

"Who Is Ozymandias? and other puzzles in poetry" by John Fuller (Chatto & Windus, 2011)

He begins by stating his position

• "This book is intended to comfort readers who find poetry difficult by showing that everyone, including professional critics, can find it difficult", p.vii
• "my basic position is this: if a poem has not in the first place earned its claims upon us in some way, by getting into our head and charming us, teasing us or impressing us, then we are hardly guilty of anything if we put it aside", p.viii
• "The suspicion is generally and often rightly held that poetry is 'about' something other than its ostensible subject, and that there is a reason for its concealment ... This concealment might not be deliberate, of course", p.7
• "it is, of course, possible for a critic to create his own puzzles and leave us no less in the dark. This is particularly true of critics who are also poets", p.35

He addresses these issues, though I'd prefer a more analytical treatment, with problems classified according to the nature of their difficulty (using the list on the "Conclusion" section as chapter headings), and a more rigorously psychological approach (what gives readers a sense of puzzlement and what will sate them?). Asides can last pages - I think the space taken up discussing "The Wasteland" vs "The Waste Land" could have been better used. His method varies according to the poem rather randomly, it seems to me. E.g.

• For Larkin's "high windows" he points out that the final image is the answer to "I wonder if" then collects and assesses interpretations - "the windows of Larkin's top-floor flat" (Tom Paulin); "ideal freedom and happiness" (A.T. Tolley); "haunting sense of difficulty and pain" (Janice Rossen); "typical of Larkin's way of verbalising oblivion" (John Bayley); "ecstatic nullity" (Steve Clark); "translucent nihilism" (Stan Smith), "Dantesque vision of paradisal beauty" (Stan Smith); related to Mallarmé's Les Fenetres (Barbara Everett). He suggests De Quincey as an influence or at least a clue.
• For "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream" he doesn't quote critics. He quotes half a page of Hamlet - "... Your worm is your only emperor for diet ...", pointing out that "Ice-cream is truly democratic, being the national food of a country which has eschewed emperors".

Ideas come and go, interesting in themselves

• "Poetry surprises us with what we already know", p.3
• "Spacing in poetry is nothing to do with space and everything to do with time", p.22
• "In Imagist poetry (and in the Symbolist poetry which precedes it) the image is deliberately isolated from all applications and conclusions, not so much to create an insoluble puzzle as to allow the reader the unhindered pleasure of solving it, often fairly quickly, but sometimes not at all quickly, and on occasion never quite", p.13
• "The Ouija board found its fulfilment precisely in the need of the bereaved, particularly after the First World War, to be consoled", p.91
• "This example will have to stand for the many minor dull puzzles that arise when reading much modern poetry. Persistence of interpretation will often be rewarded, but that process doesn't mean that the poems are any good", p.102
• "It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship", p.228

He mentions Google several times, and YouTube, and flarf. I like his explanations of Carroll's Snark, Boojum and Bandersnatch.

Other reviews

• Nicholas Lezard (Guardian)
• Brandon Robshaw (Independent)
• davesbookblog