A walk is like a knot that gets undone,
And yet it keeps us closer.

In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality.

Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime’s understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our path: ‘Can you tell / Me / Something of love?’

"'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