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Poets
change throughout their lives and often adopt new styles - the case of Yeats
springs to mind, or Auden post-1939. Sometimes it is external events driving
such changes (the latter), sometimes it is an aesthetic or artistic
development (the former). Roy Fuller's poetic output, gathered here in an
attractive new volume, provides a further instance of this.
Early Fuller began at the tail-end of the 1930s, that 'low' dishonest
decade', as Auden termed it. The first poems selected here discuss the
Spanish Civil War and, like many products of that experience, breathe a vivid
sense of engagement and contemporary urban landscapes. 'To My Brother', for
instance, reeks of wartime anxiety:
..nothing can save me tonight
From the scenic railway journey over
Europe to locate my future grave...
There is an atmosphere of late-1930s political disenchantment behind some of
these pieces and others describe Fuller's navy experiences in Africa and
elsewhere.
Fast-forward to the 1950s and mid-period Fuller is somehow at times bundled
in with Movement poetry: the suburban, quotidian, daily existence probed by
the poems is not a million miles from minor Larkin and Amis. Those familiar
with the turquoise Collected Poems published by Deutsch in 1962 will be equally
familiar with the first 80 pages of this collection, too.
However, there is a late Fuller style which is very different, encompassing
the many volumes published in the second half of his life, from around
Buff
(1965) right up to 1993's posthumous Last Poems and this later poetry is
the real reason for seeking out this book. In his 1957 collection,
Brutus's Orchard, Fuller began to write conversation poems, allowing him to
include a wider range of material. As Neil Powell points out in his helpful
afterword, the key example of this is 'The Ides of March', a dramatic
monologue in which Brutus, in his orchard, awaits the arrival of his conspirators,
whom he greets as 'comrades'. This urbane figure thoughtfully considers the
portents, his loyalties, how compromised he is: it is a piece written by
someone who has lived through the trials of Spain and the cold war tensions
of the 1950s.
This prepared the way for Fuller's late style of unrhymed syllabic metre,
from New Poems (1968) onwards, and these poems take up the final 110 pages of
this selection. The gains in scope made in his conversational monologues were
built upon in these final volumes, often in long sonnet sequences. To take a
random example, 'Shakespeare and Co.' from the 1975 collection From the
Joke Shop,
considers late Beethoven, Shakespeare's late comedies, the nature of
suffering, Richard Dadd's delusions and autumnal creativity - that final
topic a recurring trope. These are poems with a surfeit of content,
therefore, but written in a deceptively easy, almost conversational tone -
'when all's said and done', the aforementioned poem concludes. This is, of
course, an illusion to mask Fuller's considerable craftsmanship, but it is an alluring trick, giving these
late poems a charm and lightness that often works against their darkening
subject-matter.
Having achieved this high-wire balancing act, Fuller became intensely
prolific in his last ten years: 60 pages here cover some of his last three volumes,
highlights being excerpts from 'Quatrains of an Elderly Man' (the same trick,
repeated with ease, in a mere four lines) and the entire sequence 'Later
Sonnets from the Portuguese', in which the poet adopts the persona of an
estranged wife. As his son John notes in the foreword these late poems work
by allowing the circumstantial to gradually build up a cumulative power, and
are perhaps best read as entire sequences for this reason.
Even this selection only begins to scratch the surface of the later work -
Available for Dreams (1989), for example, is represented by 15 pages from a 150-page
collection. As a one-volume introduction to Fuller's entire corpus, it is
difficult to see how this could be bettered. For those who find Larkin on old
age irredeemably bleak and misanthropic, here is the answer - Roy Fuller,
jokey, meditative, civilised, occasionally mordant, on the dying of the
light.
©
M.C.Caseley 2012
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