[Clive Watkins]

Dear Jane

At one time I had three collections by John Fuller on my shelves, but they did not survive a cull I conducted about ten years ago. I came to feel that what I took away from his poems was too often not much more than an admiring sense of his formal versatility and wit. For me, the poem you post is an instance.

There are poems by his father, Roy Fuller (1912-1991), that I enjoy more and still return to, particularly some in syllabics from his 1968 collection New Poems.

The other book by John Fuller on my shelves is the most recent edition of his invaluable commentary on the poems of W. H. Auden.

The cover you post is most evocative: The Hogarth Press, which became a Chatto and Windus imprint after the War. In that series I still have Adrienne Rich’s Selected Poems from 1967, Norman MacCaig’s Surroundings (also 1967) and Leslie Norris’s Finding Gold (that too from 1967). What a good year 1967 was! Leslie Norris, a Welshman, who lived in the USA for many years in the latter part of his life, wrote some very fine poems and is perhaps somewhat overlooked these days.

All the best!

Clive