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 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’ * Ian McEwan, author of What We Can Know *
‘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 *
’[It’s] impossible not to admire his [Fuller’s] enduring formal skill and relish for life’ * Times Literary Supplement *

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.

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