John Fuller
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John Fuller
The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love (and the failures and compromises that accompany that desire) in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. It begins with Petrarch, who created great lyric poetry out of an impossible infatuation, and moves through Coleridge’s self-induced guilt within domestic happiness, Matthew Arnold’s disbelief in mutual love, Brahm’s self-delusion and the complexities of Wallace Stevens’s marriage. It so happens that both Brahms and Arnold found themselves contemplating their art and their lives in the small Swiss town of Thun, and it is Thun that provides the setting for the wonderful concluding poem of this collections in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyhood and his parents’ marriage.
John Fuller
Ghosts is John Fuller’s fifteenth collection of poetry. In it he reckons with his own mortality, writing poems about the deaths of people he has known and the births of grandchildren, at the same time as looking forward to the time when he too will pass on. As always in his poetry, there is a probing into the meaning of life, a wonderfully melodic personal dialogue in which the poet asks and attempts to answer in the course of a poem some of life’s more mysterious questions. But such philosophical musings are always anchored in beautifully concrete,…
