John Fuller’s most recent collection of poems is Now and for a Time; his latest novel is The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole, by Herself: both are published by Chatto.
We have seen this pebble before Though three feet under. From year To year it changes position.
The sea dwindles its contours But not to my brief eye In a mere decade of watching.
Stone keeps its secrets. Its smoothness is a ruse To content us with surface.
At the heart of stone is pure Concentration, which life Is foolishly in love with.
We believe that the stillness comes From its exact...
You and I, when our days are done, must say Without exactly saying it, goodbye. If we could choose at such a time one free Embodiment which might, by being the last, Stand in the account somehow as one Generous entry putting the whole in credit, What and where would it be, that final choice?
There are times such as when we have had them Must serve in their completeness for the fancy, For they...
Nervousness and nostalgia mark these three novels. The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the...
How much do love and sex have in common? Not enough, it seems, for them to appear together in anthologies, which increasingly cater either for the sentimental or the pornographic market. We need...
What do the lives and thoughts of other people feel like? We’ll never really know, but fiction offers as good an approximation of knowing as we’re likely to come across. That...
The innocent child, eavesdropping on adults and adulteries, puzzled by half-heard conversations and half-understood hints, has a respectable history in fiction: What Maisie knew, The Go-Between,...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short...
There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing...
Glowacki’s novel makes trouble for itself. The work is translated – one of the two ways in which, notoriously, a British book can be guaranteed to lose money (the other sure thing is...
Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded...
Doubts, prevarications, velleities, different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets,...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.