John FullerJohn Fuller
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Biography
Poet, novelist and critic John Fuller was born on 1 January 1937 in Ashford, Kent. His father was the poet Roy Fuller, who died in 1991. John Fuller was educated at New College, Oxford, and won the Newdigate Prize in 1960 for his poem 'A Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel'. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, he began an academic career in 1962 as Visiting Lecturer in English at the State University of New York. He lectured at the University of Manchester between 1963 and 1966 and became Fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1966.
His published work includes the poetry collections Epistles to Several Persons (1973), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1974, The Illusionists (1980), winner of the Southern Arts Literature Prize, Stones and Fires (1996), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), and the collection Now and for a Time (2002). The Space of Joy was published in 2006, and shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. Song and Dance, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published in 2008.
John Fuller is also a respected novelist: his fiction includes Flying to Nowhere (1983), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Look Twice (1991), The Worm and the Star (1993) and A Skin Diary (1997). His books written for children include The Last Bid (1975) and The Extraordinary Wool Mill and Other Stories (1980). The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole, by Herself (2001), is a portrait of the 18th-century painter, philosopher and femme fatale.
John Fuller is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Children, Criticism, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry
Bibliography
Fairground Music Chatto & Windus, 1961
The Tree That Walked Chatto & Windus, 1967
Herod Do Your Worst Novello, 1968
The Art of Love The Review, 1968
A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden Thames & Hudson, 1970
Squeaking Crust Chatto & Windus, 1970
The Labours of Hercules: A Sonnet Sequence Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1970
The Wreck Turret Books, 1970
Boys in a Pie Steam Press, 1972
Cannibals and Missionaries Secker & Warburg, 1972
The Sonnet Methuen, 1972
The Spider Monkey Uncle King Novello, 1972
Epistles to Several Persons Secker & Warburg, 1973
Hut Groups Cellar Press, 1973
Penguin Modern Poets 22 Penguin, 1973
The Last Bid André Deutsch, 1975
The Mountain in the Sea Secker & Warburg, 1975
Lies and Secrets Secker & Warburg, 1979
The Extraordinary Wool Mill and Other Stories André Deutsch, 1980
The Illusionists Secker & Warburg, 1980
New Poetry 8 (editor) Hutchinson, 1982
Selected Poems 1954-1982 Secker & Warburg, 1982
Waiting for the Music Salamander Press, 1982
Come Aboard and Sail Away Salamander Press, 1983
Flying to Nowhere Salamander Press, 1983
The Beautiful Inventions Secker & Warburg, 1983
The Dramatic Works of John Gay (editor) Oxford University Press, 1983
Selected Poems Secker & Warburg, 1985
The Adventures of Speedfall Salamander Press, 1985
Partingtime Hall (with James Fenton) Salamander Press, 1987
Tell It Me Again Chatto & Windus, 1988
The Grey Among the Green Chatto & Windus, 1988
The Burning Boys Chatto & Windus, 1989
Look Twice Chatto & Windus, 1991
The Mechanical Body Chatto & Windus, 1991
The Worm and the Star Chatto & Windus, 1993
The Chatto Book of Love Poetry (editor and introduction) Chatto & Windus, 1995
Collected Poems Chatto & Windus, 1996
Stones and Fires Chatto & Windus, 1996
A Skin Diary Chatto & Windus, 1997
W. H. Auden: A Commentary Faber and Faber, 1998
The Oxford Book of Sonnets (editor) Oxford University Press, 2000
The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole, by Herself Chatto & Windus, 2001
Now and for a Time Chatto & Windus, 2002
Ghosts Chatto & Windus, 2004
Flawed Angel Chatto & Windus, 2005
The Space of Joy Chatto & Windus, 2006
Song and Dance Chatto & Windus, 2008
Prizes and awards
1960 Newdigate Prize ('A Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel)
1961 Richard Hillary Memorial Prize
1967 Eric Gregory Award
1974 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Epistles to Several Persons
1980 Southern Arts Literature Prize The Illusionists
1983 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Flying to Nowhere
1983 Cholmondeley Award
1983 Whitbread First Novel Award Flying to Nowhere
1996 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Stones & Fires
2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Now and for a Time
2004 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist) Ghosts
2007 Costa Poetry Award (shortlist) The Space of Joy
Critical Perspective
John Fuller is a virtuoso in whom remarkable stanzaic skill is allied to a playful intellectual stance. He is the leading member of a tendency that could be called post-Movement. His work satisfies Movement requirements for order, clarity, empirical veracity but Fuller is a far more playful, inventive poet than his immediate predecessors. His father was Roy Fuller and his mentor Auden. John Fuller has never quite acquired Auden's gravitas but the civic meditation that Auden made his own is one of Fuller's favoured modes.
Fuller's poetry began to appear in the early 'sixties and from the first it sparkled with shear verbal brilliance, wit and formal dexterity. Early poems such as 'Timbal's Song', 'Song' and 'A Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel' were highly conscious imitations of Auden but from The Tree That Walked (1967) Fuller's voice came through in poems like 'Alive and Dead' and its distinctive tone was of emotional disturbance projected onto an imaginative assortment of objective correlatives 'Kneading an untuned piano in the dark', 'A single curiously worn down tyre' taken from the poem 'Scenario for a Walk-on Part'. A key poem from this period is the abandoned lover's monologue 'Her Morning Dreams' from Cannibals and Missionaries (1972), in which one of the oldest themes in poetry is revived in a series of startling but entirely apt metaphors:
'Life shrunk and wrinkled to its seams,
it's hopes on threads, its memories in pockets,
the sluggish mouth disowning all its streams'
and:
'I pull the whole drawer of my mind down on my foot.'
Fuller's formal skill has often led him to undertake formidable challenges. He excels at verse letters, Epistles to Several Persons (1973) evokes the intellectual life of the 'seventies in its dialogues with the work and ideas of James Fenton, Ian Hamilton, the composer Bryan Kelly and the playwright David Caute. The Illusionists (1980) is a verse novel about the world of art dealing. Although it is written in the Eugene Onegin stanza its true model is Auden's Letter to Lord Byron. But while the Auden is autobiographical, his Bildungsroman, Fuller's is a fictional life, the unsentimental education of a representative figure of our times:
'Come with me, then, to Adam's Palate
And eat as our forefathers did.
Mangold soup and groundsel salad
Will only set you back three quid.'
Chess and music are amongst Fuller's interests that surface in his poems. They can sometimes give an impression of donnish austerity but he is also a brilliant writer of light verse. Thanks to the BBC's The Nation's Favourite Love Poems, his 'Valentine' has become well known:
'I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.'
Often his poems have a song-like quality, and some indeed were conceived as songs. 'Barbed Wire Blues', from Stones and Fires (1996), is a good example. Barbed wire comes in various varieties with exotic names, a found poem then if you've come across the names:
'How's that wild thing getting in?,
Keep him out with 4 Point 1 Between,
Roll me 4 Point 1 Between, yes, and nail it clean,
My baby has the tightest snatch you ever seen.'
In his most recent work, a strong humanistic civic note has emerged in poems concerned with the current state of the world. The long poem 'Europe' from Stones and Fires is an Audenesque meditation on European history with the Bosnian war in mind:
'To be the powers! To sit with microphones
At tables gently circular as the
Great globe itself...'
This book also has one of Fuller's most successful Audenesque meditations, 'Star Gazing', 'Alpha Centauri in the night / Look down and tell me what to think...' But Auden referred to the stars briefly in passing, as in 'Voltaire at Ferney ('Overhead, the stars composed their lucid song'), Fuller's very long poem manages to say most of what has been thought and felt about the cosmos, but with a wit and delicacy that grounds it in human concerns:
'Perhaps it's something she forgot?
Her one good eye is vacant, more
Like a bruise, a cobweb or a blot.
And we stare back. But don't know what
On earth she can be looking for.'
As an Oxonian poet through and through - he is a don at Magdalen College where he has been an influential teacher of James Fenton, Alan Hollinghurst and Mick Imlah among others - his reputation was to some extent sidelined in the 'eighties with the rise of provincial poets who were often explicitly anti-Oxford. But Fuller's poetry is some of the most inventive and graceful to appear in English in the late twentieth century, and if invention and grace are deprecated that is an indictment of the times not the poetry.
Peter Forbes, 2002
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
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