Asleep and Awake

An elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John Fuller

John Fuller, born in Ashford, Kent, is an acclaimed poet and novelist. His collection Stones and Fires (1996) was awarded the Forward Prize; Ghosts (2004) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Poetry; The Space of Joy (2006) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and The Grey Among the Green (1988), Song &amp; Dance (2008) and Pebble &amp; I (2010) were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His 1983 novel Flying to Nowhere won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written collections of short stories and several books for children. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

An elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John Fuller 
 
In this personal and characteristically brilliant new collection from John Fuller, an abundance of memories abound. From “those once endless years” of a childhood in wartime – tasting of Granny’s chicken soup, twizzers and cherry-go-rips – to the pattern of family and friendships, important milestones are brought to vivid life. In ‘Before We Met – and After’ a sequence of recollections cherish a wife on her eightieth birthday; ‘In Whose Head’ a piece by Schumann is revisited through advancing years; and in ‘Keeper of the Fire’ and ‘In Memory of John Bayley’ late poems of remembrance memorialise lost friends. 
 
These are poems of being and time, full of lyric feeling and Fuller’s distinctive wit and lightness of touch. Alive with the clang and sway of the “chosen colours of daily family life”, together they form a resonant gathering of poems that celebrate, with thoughtfulness and joy, “the feel and length of our lives”.

The Bone Flowers

Published in a special signed limited edition of 500 copies to celebrate the author's 80th birthday, John Fuller's full-length narrative poem is resonant celebration of life and the things we leave behind.

One of England’s greatest  poets – an artist unafraid to combine intellect with sensuousness

‘When does a poem end?’ 
 
In this rambunctious romp of a narrative poem, John Fuller taps out the rhythms of life against the riddle of time: from his story of opportunistic art-dealer Old Billy Emerald and his fabled Shakespeare manuscript, to the ghosts of great poets and remembrances of old friends. 
 
The Bone Flowers is a resonant celebration of the things we leave behind – in art, music and poetry – as well as a stirring memento mori to gather our rosebuds while we may.

Gravel in my Shoe

A tour de force new collection from ‘one of England's finest poets’ (Daily Telegraph)

The free-wheeling, conversational, frequently didactic tone suits Fuller perfectly, enabling him to comment on art as well as life.

A significant presence in British letters

'The only peace: to know my place 
And what I now must do, 
Striding with the light full in my face, 
And gravel in my shoe.' 
 
 
Bright, elemental and as dexterously brilliant as ever, John Fuller's latest collection takes as its subject 'our ends and our origins'. Here are songs, serenades, literary cameos, an ode to a golden anniversary, a long letter to an old friend, and two majestic sequences: one dedicated to the Welsh woman of the woods, Mary Price; the other, sun-drenched sonnets that keenly observe the natural world against 'the flavour of our own mortality'. 
 
With wit, warmth and wisdom, Gravel in My Shoe playfully balances the light and shade of life, in full awareness of its passing but with a spring in its step nevertheless. It shows us, ultimately, that 'life is too short, but poetry's eternal'.

Song & Dance

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A sense of playfulness allied to impeccable formal skill runs through this lively new collection of light verse and occasional poems from one of our most inventive and graceful poets

Witty, sardonic and anti-romantic...This collection is Fuller's most accessible and enjoyable yet.

Jealous curses and hate poems, love lyrics and erotic dances: John Fuller has always written light verse, and Song &amp; Dance is a boisterous and engaging collection, fizzing with intelligence and wit. There are tributes, and there are celebrations. Jokes abound in 'The Spellchecker's Guide to Poetry' and the wine is poured for 'Florio Drinking Song'. Befitting Fuller's musical ear, a host of rhythms beat time. Fans will fall on pleasingly intricate riddles and admire the high-wire gymnastics of unusual verse forms, including the inverted rhopalics of 'The Trans-sexual Circus'. 
 
But behind the fun is some sharp criticism of literary attitudinising, and a climactic injunction, to dance while we can, preferably with each other.

Flawed Angel

A jewel of a fable, sparkling with wit and magic, unsettling, inspired by the Arabian Nights but with the singularity and heartrending pathos of fairy tales by Oscar Wilde.

Flawed Angel is easy to read, but persists in the mind when it has been read, and asks to be thought about

A clever pastiche of an Arabian fable in which the 18th-century ruler of a Middle Eastern land reluctantly faces up to the unsuitability of his son, a fat, dreamy boy, to act as his heir...Playful yet intelligent, it's an impressive exercise in literary impersonation

The fabulous plot carries us along at a goodish speed and...[t]he manner of writing is sculpted, arch, luscious, mellifluous, anachronistic, and a touch wayward

A beautifully textured homily on the indomitable nature of truth. As such, Fuller finally hits that elusive mark: a novel as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally beguiling

Thought-provoking, sumptuously written...a curiously beautiful and life-affirming story

It's reassuring to know that you can still go into a bookshop and buy something about dreams and souls without feeling embarrassed

Playful yet intelligent, it's an impressive exercise in literary impersonation

A beguiling mix of singsong and sweet poetry.This book begs to be read aloud

A repertory of wonders. Told with his usual warmth and wit

The most entertaining and original novel this year... Stylish

Highly original... It would be hard to top the wonderful whimsical invention of Flawed Angel

Once upon a time in a Middle Eastern land, a fat, sweet-natured little boy grows up as the son of an important ruler. His older brother was apparently still-born and so he is the heir to his father's kingdom. 
 
But far away from the royal palace a lonely prospector happens across a wild creature, half boy, half animal, roaming the forests. Eventually this strange child's adventures lead him to the capital and into the path of a platoon of deserters from Napoleon's army - the flashy, ultimately dangerous, face of Enlightenment thought in this isolated kingdom - with drastic consequences. 
 
With original poems embedded like gems in the text, this is a fable for all ages, full of shivers and delights, sadness and wonder.

The Dice Cup

A new collection of prose poems, from one Chatto's finest poets

John Fuller has achieved a melding of form and content as profound and…as original as any in The Dice Cup, with a poise and beauty that prose…cannot conjure

‘In the dice cup, then, life becomes not a design but a wager; not an adventure but a game…’ 
 
Brimming with brio and brilliance, John Fuller’s latest collection comprises exquisite philosophical arguments, dream visions, aphorisms, precise portraits, colourful fables and tableaux of life. But here too lie shadows: in departures and deteriorations, in a life balanced delicately between the known and the unknown. 
 
Taken together, The Dice Cup unfolds like a Chinese box of observations; wit, humour, pathos and playfulness entwine to thrilling and thought-provoking effect. It is a late, great work from one of our finest poets.

And other Puzzles in Poetry

Who Is Ozymandias?

An intelligent yet playful look at some of the most teasing and mystifying puzzles in poetry - a delightful addition to any poetry-lover's shelf.

Fuller's book should encourage many to go off and puzzle out poems for themselves

John Fuller is both a well-published poet and a well-tested critic of contemporary poetry. This new book gets to grips with the essential puzzlement of poetry...It is not a densely theoretical book, but written engagingly and approachably

It leaps from peak to peak, fuelled by an immense amount of learning and experience

A witty, erudite and illuminating book, which encourages one to enjoy the puzzles and pleasures of poetry without fear

Fuller’s guide will help poetry novices and experienced readers alike

Perceptive and playful…Fuller guides readers through the fundamental questions that make interpreting a poem so enjoyable and rewarding

Part of the pleasure of poetry is unravelling the mysteries and difficulties it contains and solving the puzzles that lie within. Who, for instance, is Ozymandias? What is the Snark? Who is the Emperor of Ice-Cream? Or indeed, who is 'you' in a poem? 
 
In this perceptive and playful new book, acclaimed poet John Fuller looks at some of our greatest poems and considers the number of individual puzzles at their heart, casting light on how we should approach these conundrums as readers. From riddling to double entendres, mysterious titles to red herrings, Fuller unpicks the puzzles in works that range from Browning to Bishop, Empson to Eliot, Shelley to Stevens, to help us reach the rewards and revelations that lie at the centre of some of our best-loved poems.

The Grey Among The Green

The Grey Among The Green is John Fuller's eleventh collection, and his first since Selected Poems 1954-1982. Generally acknowledged to be the most accomplished and influential poet of his generation, John Fuller is always brilliantly in command of a dazzling diversity of themes and moods. This collection is his finest to date; its brio and reflective gravity will delight his admirers and win many new appreciative readers.

The Worm and the Star

The tales collected here are complete miniature narratives. None longer than three pages, they rove, with hurtling changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death; yet a strange unity of purpose binds them into a coherent universe where lives are brief but great mysteries are glimpsed.

1983-2008

New Selected Poems

A welcome new selection of John Fuller's poems, taken from his last eight collections and spanning over two decades of work

An excellent introduction to one of England’s greatest poets – an artist unafraid to combine intellect with sensuousness. After all, sometimes “poetry’s the only heaven we have”.

Belong[s] on the shelf of every poetry lover ... Sustained and deeply felt

This rich selection of John Fuller’s poems, made by the author himself, is taken from his last eight collections and spans over twenty-five years of work. 
 
'Everything goes back to earth,' writes Fuller, 'But first it must dance / Dance to exhaustion.' His poems, brilliant in their dexterity and virtuoso in their use of form, engage with a spectacular range of subjects, revealing a dark, haunted imagination leavened by moments of exuberant levity. 
 
Taken together, they form an elegant, enquiring and accomplished body of work, and one that confirms John Fuller as a significant and influential figure in British poetry.

Ghosts

Warm, humane, beautifully lucid poems on death, birth and the need to seize the day by one of Britain's most important poets. 
 
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Poetry.

I have much admired and enjoyed John Fuller's collection of poems Ghosts. He contemplates age and death with a kind of glee and surprised intelligence that I find very sympathetic

Elegant, surprising meditations on approaching death - the persistence of past people and things, and the liveliness of infants

Fuller is a wonderfully skilled craftsman and the grace and elegance of his style is at the service of not only a sharp wit and intelligence, but a great depth of feeling

Fuller's poetry can be seen to build a bridge of boats between light verse and solemn energy with the best technique of anyone writing in Britain now

Like the possible phantoms that stalk the dark passageways of its title poem, John Fuller's beautifully lucid collection explores the grey area between life and death. Full of self-deprecating wit and subtle insight, the poems contemplate the inevitability that, when one reaches a certain age, the moment of one's own passing will start to haunt one. 
 
In 'Flea Market' there is the pathos of once-loved objects laid out, meaningless, 'on the cobbles for scavengers'. In 'Positions in the Bed', the restless search for a comfortable way to sleep leads to thoughts of the morning when 'we find/ Ourselves absconded from the body's/ Weary roll-call'. And yet, out of this sense of mortality, grows a determination to take delight in the moment, to appreciate fully 'the business of living'. 
 
These poems are not only intimate, domestic and often funny, they are uncompromising in the way they confront the huge and unanswerable questions of life. The movement of thought is rendered beautifully concrete in the intricate music of their langauge, and melancholy co-exists with a lightness of touch that builds a moving and humane barricade against 'life's brevity/ And it's insignificance'. 
 
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Poetry.

Collected Poems

John Fuller is one of England's most important and admired poets. This paperback reissue of his Collected Poems makes it accessible to a wider market.

For a large number of writers... the decisive influence

Unignorable... 480 pages of amazing artistry, subtle throughout and ghostly music

Mozartian in abundance, versatility, brilliance and depth

John Fuller is one of the most accomplished, prolific and popular of contemporary poets. His Collected Poems brings together most of his poems, from his first collection, Fairground Music (1961) to Stones and Fires (winner of the 1996 Forward Poetry Prize), and enables us to appreciate the full extent of his remarkable talents. From his strikingly assured early poems - dramatic monologues and playful rewritings of myth and fairytale - to his more complex, discursive later work, Fuller displays his virtuosity with a wide variety of subjects, moods and forms. 
 
Here are fantasies, poems about nature, riddles and nonsense poems; tender love poems and philosophical meditations; sombre, wistful sonnets and the lightest, most charming songs. But there are consistent themes: romantic love, a potent sense of the physical world, and a constant shifting between exuberant irreverence and the yearning for moral and metaphysical truths. Throughout, the poems are steeped in humour and learning, and display Fuller's easy command of the of the whole scope and richness of the English language.

Pebble & I

An enquiring and elegiac new collection from one of Britain's most respected and accomplished poets

One of the most enjoyable things about these latest offerings from John Fuller is the subtlety and variety of their descriptive detail... packed with his usual technical brio and range of tone, but what impresses more than anything is the precise and playful imagery

One of our most productive and ingenious poets... bravely jaunty throughout

From the posing of the very first question in the opening poem, 'Fragment of a Victorian Dialogue', John Fuller's enquiring and elegiac new collection arrives with a sharp sense of mortality, marked by the passing of time. 
 
Pebble &amp; I responds to its own philosophical enquiries by looking to a world of vivid colour and substance. From the sun-baked pebbles and plastic ice-cream spines that bedeck the 'The Jetsam Garden', to the swallows that nest under the eaves of a farmhouse in the Cilento Hills in 'Stop', the poems take us from inky, restless seascapes to the warmth of the Mediterranean as they examine the connections between man and 'our material cousins' in nature. 
 
Seductive, yet sometimes playfully absurd, Fuller plumbs the depths with his trademark light touch and deft technical skill. The natural and social worlds can be as cruel as they are thrilling but ultimately the voices in this collection are here to celebrate 'elements of the eternal / In the ceremony of life.'

The Space of Joy

In a series of poems that tell a story, John Fuller contemplates that age-old question of 'Life versus Art'. The verse is both a brilliant pastiche of such great artists as Petrarch, Coleridge and Wallace Stevens, and an exploration of their private lives and craft.

Sustained and deeply felt, it is unafraid to create 'The Space of Joy'

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 collection in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyood 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. 
 
Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

Now and for a Time

John Fuller is one of England's most important poets. His new collection exhibits a remarkable a depth of experience and philosophical maturity.

Fuller has continued to write as no one doubts he can: with dry urbanity and unflappable abundance

Fuller is a wondefully skilled craftsman and the grace and elegance of his style is at the service of not only a sharp wit and intelligence, but a great depth of feeling

In the clicking of his faultless rhyme [he] captures mortality

Throughout his long and prolific career, John Fuller has been admired for the way in which he melds levity with serious reflection. In this beautiful new collection of twenty-one poems he proves himself, once again, a true master of this art. 
 
They take us from birth to death: from a baby's first delightful babblings, to the dignified, measured words of a man surveying his life and marriage, and looking forward into the unknown. There are moments of great joie de vivre, of pleasure in the earthy things of life; and yet, beyond, there is always a sense of a vaster, more elusive universe. 
 
The snorting of the horses in a field in 'Dreams', the egret on the rock in 'Sentinel': these are nature's mysteries. To make sense of these, we have language and music. Celebratory, playful, reconciled to the questions that will not be answered, these poems exude a miraculous kind of peace and understanding: 'A point of closure that allows the next/Inevitable sentence to begin'.

The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole

Dazzling and enjoyable - why have we overlooked this extraordinary woman? Is this a genuine memoir? A work of art criticism? A scholarly bodice ripper? Brilliant ventriloquism? Try it for yourself-

Fuller is a master storyteller. a rollicking picaresque yarn. a portrait of a high-spirted woman, sexually curious and intellectually insatiable

A Moll Flanders of our time. A remarkable piece of work

Discovered in the secret compartment of a North Italian cabinet, this enchanting manuscript may or may not be complete, and it may or may not be intended for posterity. Undeterred by these uncertainties, John Fuller gives us the early nineteenth-century 'memoirs' of Laetitia Horsepole, painter, philosopher and femme fatale. Shelley, apparently, came across this formidable woman, aged ninety, on his travels through Italy, and became her confidant and neighbour. Why, the reader may wonder, is she not better known? Why indeed? That long spell in Madagascar certainly interrupted her career. She was prickly and disinclined to ingratiate herself with the arbiters of fashionable taste. And then her virtual disappearance to Italy didn't help matters. But her obscurity gives added piquancy to the memoirs which - her idiosyncratic art theory and philosophy apart - are above all a dramatic eighteenth-century adventure in five acts which reflect her tempestuous involvement with the five 'husbands' of her life, from the brutish Crowther and the dull and the rich but louche Count Chiavari. Laetitia reflects on the vagaries of love and erotic involvement, on art and men, on flora and fauna, and reveals for the first time what actually happened in Madagascar. Shamelessly enjoyable, teasingly allusive, irresistibly funny and sometimes sad, Laetitia's is quite simply a brilliant and bewitching romance full of truths that lie deeper than fact.

Flying To Nowhere

The award-winning, magical first novel by acclaimed poet John Fuller.

As rich and exciting as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, but deeper and more disturbing... It begins as a murder mystery but ends in a revelation of deeper mysteries of death and rebirth

A short, charged and imaginative fable-cum-murder-mystery which uses [Fuller's] gift for narrative and for elaborate metaphor to great effect

WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE. 
 
John Fuller's first novel opens with the arrival of church agent Vane on a remote Welsh island where he is to investigate the disappearance of pilgrims visiting its sacred well. While Vane looks for clues and corpses the local Abbot seaches for the location of the soul. Magical and poetic, Flying to Nowhere awakens our secret hopes and fears and our need to believe in miracles.

The Vintage Book Of Love Poetry

A sparkling production... This anthology has already provided hours of absorbing enjoyment

A very good collection, with a number of surprises

This anthology is shaped not by literary chronology but by the timeless human drama it records: its five 'acts' move from speculation and COUP DE FOUDRE through the troubled endurings of love - its consummations, dangers, joys, perversions and abdications - to loneliness and memory. In addition, the poems are presented anonymously, so that Marvell's coy lady rubs cold shoulders unexpectedly with Gershwin's naughty baby; and complex psychological fictions are overthrown by squibs. John Fuller provides a provacative introduction to this uniquely expressive handbook of shared emotion.

An Entertainment

Look Twice

John Fuller, born in Ashford, Kent, is an acclaimed poet and novelist. His collection Stones and Fires (1996) was awarded the Forward Prize; Ghosts (2004) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Poetry; The Space of Joy (2006) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and The Grey Among the Green (1988), Song & Dance (2008) and Pebble & I (2010) were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His 1983 novel Flying to Nowhere won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written collections of short stories and several books for children. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

John Fuller's brilliantly inventive fourth novel is a modern romance which playfully explores the world's need for illusion. On the last train leaving the Duchy of Gomsza, before it is seized by civil turmoil, three illusionists - an artist, journalist and a magician reveal their past failures in love and reasons for leaving. But it is th mysterious fellow traveller Jozef Pyramur who dazzles each man in turn with different versions of reality.

The Burning Boys

When David's mother is killed in the Blitz he moves to a new life in Lancashire with his young aunt Jean. As he watches the adult world around him, a fighter pilot wakes to discover his brutal disfigurement in a world he neither recognises nor remembers. The fragile link between the man and the boy as each experiences his own painful rite of passage is movely described in this powerful and evocative novel.

John Fuller

'The title poem of John Fuller’s new collection is a corona, a sonnet sequence enlivened by tough formal rules. His is a magnificent and tender celebration of long love and of abundant nature, and is a deep meditation on mortality. It’s also technically brilliant and playful. This volume shows all his strengths. The poetry has a luminous clarity. The poet takes an easy pleasure in form. Death lurks but humour and sensuousness prevail. The purpose behind his painterly gaze is ‘to write/ The lines and colours that embody light.’ The business, as Conrad might have said, is to make us see. Above all, perhaps, the reader has a sense of a lifetime’s stored wisdom wryly conveyed'

‘John Fuller’s Marston Meadows opens with the immaculate corona of sonnets that inspired Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know, but these give only a foretaste of a collection that ranges, with amazing wit, agility and deep feeling, through the changing perspectives of old age (Fuller is 89). To my mind, the most moving and luminous of all his books'

Alan Hollinghurst, author of Our Evenings

A walk is like a knot that gets undone, 
And yet it keeps us closer. 
 
In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality. 
 
Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime’s understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our path: ‘Can you tell / Me / Something of love?’

John Fuller

Praise for Marston Meadows

'The title poem of John Fuller’s new collection is a corona, a sonnet sequence enlivened by tough formal rules. His is a magnificent and tender celebration of long love and of abundant nature, and is a deep m ...

‘John Fuller’s Marston Meadows opens with the immaculate corona of sonnets that inspired Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know, but these give only a foretaste of a collection that ranges, ...

Books by John Fuller

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