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.

About the Author
Roy Fuller was born in Failsworth, Lancashire in 1912 and grew up in Blackpool. On leaving school, he trained as a solicitor. He married in 1936, and his son John was born the following year. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and then spent his working life with the Woolwich Building Society, of which he became Legal Director. His prolific literary output included eighteen collections of poetry, nine novels and four volumes of memoirs, as well as books for children. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1968 to 1973, and served on the BBC Board of Governors for seven years from 1972 and as Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, 1976-7. He was awarded the CBE and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1970. Roy Fuller died in 1991.

Reviews
'For all his self-deprecation, he had an unquenchable impulse to marvel at things - to rejoice in the merely human, and to let the sense of approaching death feel part of life.' -- Andrew Motion



Book Information
ISBN 9781847771216
Author Roy Fuller
Format Paperback
Page Count 251
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd