But there is much to be said for a summer
Without alarms. The plum crop is modest,
The monarch has remained unchanged,
Small differences only in one’s teeth and hair and verse-forms.

from ‘The Unremarkable Year’

From his first wartime collection evoking a generation’s experience of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the ‘vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar’, to the consolatory wisdom of the Last Poems of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poet of the familiar and ordinary made extraordinary. Mundane details, observed with Fuller’s tolerant humour and acute eye, reveal depths and dissonances from which a civilised life may be created: the unremarkable year ‘of painting the shed ... Is also that of harmonies / That have made one’s life and art for evermore off-key’.

On the centenary of Fuller’s birth, this generous selection, introduced by John Fuller, the poet’s son, and with an afterword by Neil Powell, Fuller’s biographer, brings to a new generation of readers the work of one of the essential twentieth-century poets.

With an afterword by Neil Powell

COVER PHOTOGRAPH Roy Fuller, February 1943. Annotated by Roy Fuller, ‘On the way up – Uganda somewhere’. Reproduced by permission of John Fuller.

A Note on the Text
Preface by John Fuller


from Poems (1939) and As From the Thirties (1983)
To M.S., Killed in Spain
August 1938
After the Spanish Civil War
To My Brother

from The Middle of a War (1942)
Autumn 1939
The Barber
First Winter of War
To My Wife
Autumn 1940
Soliloquy in an Air Raid
Epitaph on a Bombing Victim
ABC of a Naval Trainee
Defending the Harbour
Royal Naval Air Station
The End of a Leave
The Middle of a War
Another War
Spring 1942
Harbour Ferry
Goodbye for a Long Time
Troopship

from A Lost Season (1944)
The Photographs
The Green Hills of Africa
The Giraffes
The Plains
Askari’s Song
The White Conscript and the Black Conscript
Convicts Working on the Aerodrome
The Tribes
Sadness, Theory, Glass
Shore Leave Lorry
The Coast
The Petty Officer’s Mess
Today and Tomorrow
The Emotion of Fiction
The Statue
Epitaphs for Soldiers
Winter in Camp



from Epitaphs and Occasions (1949)
During a Bombardment by V-Weapons
Schwere Gustav
Meditation
To My Son
The Gaze
Obituary of R. Fuller

from Counterparts (1954)
Rhetoric of a Journey
Youth Revisited
The Image
Translation
The Meeting


from Brutus’s Orchard (1957)
Autobiography of a Lungworm
On Grazing a Finger
The Day
The Ides of March
The Perturbations of Uranus
Mythological Sonnets

from Collected Poems (1962)
Monologue in Autumn
On the Mountain
from Faustian Sketches

Questions to Mephistopheles
The Princes

The Hittites
Versions of Love
from Meredithian Sonnets

from Buff (1965)
Love and Murder
The Historian



from New Poems (1968)
The Symphonist
Chinoiserie
Reading The Bostonians in Algeciras Bay
The Map
Ambiguities of Travel
In Memory of my Cat, Domino: 1951–66
Orders
The Visitors
Disasters
Those of Pure Origin
Afternoons
Windows
Departures
Last Sheet

from Tiny Tears (1973)
Deficiencies
Tiny Tears
The Unremarkable Year
Georgic

from From the Joke Shop (1975)
The Card Table
Shakespeare and Co
Elephants, Ants, Doves
The Voyage
Essential Memory
Late November
Strange Meeting
From the Joke Shop
The Future
Being

from The Reign of Sparrows (1980)
Two Muses
Ghost Voice
Hedge-Sparrows and House-Sparrows
1935–75
The Old Toy
from In His Sixty-Fifth Year

1976 Draws to a Close
Singing, 1977

from Quatrains of an Elderly Man

In the Night
Poetry and Whist
Ordinary Seaman
Winter

from New and Collected Poems (1985)
Years
Autumn 1981
On the 160th Anniversary of the Discovery of the First Quarto of Hamlet
Old Themes
from Mianserin Sonnets

Dreams and Art

from Subsequent to Summer (1985)
Symphonic Dances
Death on the Heath
Dimensions
In God a Mathematician?
In the Park
The Powers
Anatomy of a Cat

from Consolations (1987)
Down Kaunda Street
Questions of Entropy
The Scale
Touching
Booloo
The Marcellus Version
from Literary Footnotes

Felicity

Amatory Dreaming in Old Age
Preserving
Ward 1G

from Available for Dreams (1989)
Another Art
Lessons of the Summer
Teatimes Past and Present
The Hairbrush
The Elderly Husband
Bird of Passage
Oneself
Nature Programme
Dans un Omnibus de Londres
News of the World
from The Cancer Hospital

Your Absence
Postscript

Minor Keys
Summer Laughter
Nasty Weather Ahead
Metaphors
Advice to the Elderly
The Envious Poet
Triangles
The Letter
Venus, Mars and Cupid
My Life
Later Sonnets from the Portuguese
The Story

Afterword by Neil Powell
Index of Titles and First lines