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.
If there is any resolution in this sequence of magnificently playful and thought-provoking poems, it is the conviction that while ‘poetry may be the only heaven we have’, it is life itself that must create the ‘space of joy’ which art wishes to celebrate.
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, atmospheric and sensual detail: a man sitting thinking in front of an open fire hugging his “kneehump”; the bodies of the men and women who threw themselves out of the twin tower windows floating outwards like ghosts, hovering between life and death.
As with his last collection, Now and For a Time (2002), these poems have a wonderful universality, with the language and thought perhaps more accessible than Fuller has been in the past. But at the same time, they are utterly distinctive and personal, with imagery that surprises and fills the reader with admiration at every turn.
