John Fuller

'When does a poem end?' This book is about the rhythms of life against the riddle of time. It is a celebration of the things we leave behind - in art, music and poetry - as well as a stirring memento mori to gather our rosebuds while we may.

Nowt stops for cricket in Yorkshire. Passion runs deep, beyond those in whites, to the groundsmen, tea ladies, scorers and umpires who embody the game. All Wickets Great and Small is a romp across the landscape of amateur cricket in Yorkshire during the summer of 2015. Author John Fuller looks at the key issues affecting the grassroots game: the struggles to attract players, funding shortages, natural disasters and the social dynamics that can threaten a captain's eleven on a Saturday. What shape is the grassroots game in and can it still survive and thrive? From vicars and imams socking sixes in Dewsbury to heritage clubs hitting social media out of the park, this is the story of sleeves-rolled-up cricket at its best in the county that locals call 'God's own'.

'The only peace: to know my placeAnd what I now must do,Striding with the light full in my face,And gravel in my shoe.'Bright, elemental and as dexterously brilliant as ever, John Fuller's latest collection takes as its subject 'our ends and our origins'. Here are songs, serenades, literary cameos, an ode to a golden anniversary, a long letter to an old friend, and two majestic sequences: one dedicated to the Welsh woman of the woods, Mary Price; the other, sun-drenched sonnets that keenly observe the natural world against 'the flavour of our own mortality'. With wit, warmth and wisdom, Gravel in My Shoe playfully balances the light and shade of life, in full awareness of its passing but with a spring in its step nevertheless. It shows us, ultimately, that 'life is too short, but poetry's eternal'.

‘In the dice cup, then, life becomes not a design but a wager; not an adventure but a game…’Brimming with brio and brilliance, John Fuller’s latest collection comprises exquisite philosophical arguments, dream visions, aphorisms, precise portraits, colourful fables and tableaux of life. But here too lie shadows: in departures and deteriorations, in a life balanced delicately between the known and the unknown. Taken together, The Dice Cup unfolds like a Chinese box of observations; wit, humour, pathos and playfulness entwine to thrilling and thought-provoking effect. It is a late, great work from one of our finest poets.

The Art of Coppersmithing is a practical guide to working with sheet copper, written by John Fuller Sr. and originally published in 1911. The book covers a wide range of techniques and tools used in coppersmithing, including cutting, shaping, soldering, and finishing copper sheets to create a variety of forms and designs. The author provides detailed instructions and illustrations for each step of the process, making the book accessible to both beginners and experienced craftsmen. The Art of Coppersmithing also includes information on the history of coppersmithing, as well as tips on selecting and caring for tools and materials. This classic work is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the art of coppersmithing and the history of metalworking. This Is A New Release Of The Original 1911 Edition. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Part of the pleasure of poetry is unravelling the mysteries and difficulties it contains and solving the puzzles that lie within. Who, for instance, is Ozymandias? What is the Snark? Who is the Emperor of Ice-Cream? Or indeed, who is 'you' in a poem? In this perceptive and playful new book, acclaimed poet John Fuller looks at some of our greatest poems and considers the number of individual puzzles at their heart, casting light on how we should approach these conundrums as readers. From riddling to double entendres, mysterious titles to red herrings, Fuller unpicks the puzzles in works that range from Browning to Bishop, Empson to Eliot, Shelley to Stevens, to help us reach the rewards and revelations that lie at the centre of some of our best-loved poems.

The Grey Among The Green is John Fuller's eleventh collection, and his first since Selected Poems 1954-1982. Generally acknowledged to be the most accomplished and influential poet of his generation, John Fuller is always brilliantly in command of a dazzling diversity of themes and moods.

The tales collected here are complete miniature narratives. None longer than three pages, they rove, with hurtling changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death; yet a strange unity of purpose binds them into a coherent universe where lives are brief but great mysteries are glimpsed.

This rich selection of John Fuller’s poems, made by the author himself, is taken from his last eight collections and spans over twenty-five years of work.'Everything goes back to earth,' writes Fuller, 'But first it must dance / Dance to exhaustion.' His poems, brilliant in their dexterity and virtuoso in their use of form, engage with a spectacular range of subjects, revealing a dark, haunted imagination leavened by moments of exuberant levity. Taken together, they form an elegant, enquiring and accomplished body of work, and one that confirms John Fuller as a significant and influential figure in British poetry.

"Art Of Coppersmithing" is a detailed and interesting treatise on the subject, exploring its history and development and giving precise, illustrated instructions as to how various results are achieved. Written with the beginner in mind, this volume is ideal for students and those new to metalwork, especially to coppersmithing. Contents include: "Metal Work", "Preface To First Edition", "Preface To Fourth Edition", "Historical Sketch Of Copper", "The Brazier's Art, Or Light", "Coppersmithing", "First Year's Experience", "Repairing And Tinning", "The Boy's Second Year", "Making Washing-Coppers", "Making Brewing-Coppers", etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on metal work.

Writing the Picture is a rare collaboration between a leading photographer and an eminent poet. Even more rare, it is a collaboration in which the poet responds to images, rather than a photographer or artists 'illustrating' a poem. The book evolved from a previous assignment for The Independent in which Fuller agreed to write about Hurn's pictures as long as the 'captions' could be poetryA". The result was a group of startlingly good poems which drew upon and illuminated a selection of Hurn's equally stunning images. Writing the Picture extends that early success into a book of 50 duotone images and poems in which Hurn's particular skill as a photographer of reportage sparks Fuller's own skill as a writer who both draws out meaning and launches into the thought-provoking. The sheer variety of image and poem makes the book an all the more impressive achievement. From warm portraits of rural Wales to a drug addict shooting up in London, from a raucous hen night to a moving suite of images of the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, photographer and poet respond to all aspects of life. The result is such a marvellous and magical meeting of artforms that it is surprising it doesn't happen more frequently. Hurn and Fuller provide an intriguing Introduction by way of a 'conversation' in which they discuss the processes of their collaboration and the differences and similarities which poetry and photography share in the creating of art.

From the posing of the very first question in the opening poem, 'Fragment of a Victorian Dialogue', John Fuller's enquiring and elegiac new collection arrives with a sharp sense of mortality, marked by the passing of time. Pebble & I responds to its own philosophical enquiries by looking to a world of vivid colour and substance. From the sun-baked pebbles and plastic ice-cream spines that bedeck the 'The Jetsam Garden', to the swallows that nest under the eaves of a farmhouse in the Cilento Hills in 'Stop', the poems take us from inky, restless seascapes to the warmth of the Mediterranean as they examine the connections between man and 'our material cousins' in nature. Seductive, yet sometimes playfully absurd, Fuller plumbs the depths with his trademark light touch and deft technical skill. The natural and social worlds can be as cruel as they are thrilling but ultimately the voices in this collection are here to celebrate 'elements of the eternal / In the ceremony of life.'

Now available for the first time in paperback, John Fuller's Commentary is a compendious yet condensed reference work dealing with all of Auden's writings. For every poem, play or libretto, Fuller encapsulates the publishing history, paraphrases difficult passages, explains allusions, points out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identifies sources and influences, looks at the verse form and offers critical interpretation. Auden's formal and intellectual range challenges comparison with Eliot or Yeats, and his particular interests - psychological, anthropological, prosodic, theological, historical - lend an added resonance to the texture of his work, all of which is explored and interpreted, with exemplary lucidity, in this most essential of one-volume companions. 'magnificent . . . a model of scholarly engagement that is both rigorous and readable.' Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love (and the failures and compromises that accompany that desire) in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. It begins with Petrarch, who created great lyric poetry out of an impossible infatuation, and moves through Coleridge's self-induced guilt within domestic happiness, Matthew Arnold's disbelief in mutual love, Brahm's self-delusion and the complexities of Wallace Stevens's marriage. It so happens that both Brahms and Arnold found themselves contemplating their art and their lives in the small Swiss town of Thun, and it is Thun that provides the setting for the wonderful concluding poem of this collection in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyood and his parents' marriage. If there is any resolution in this sequence of magnificently playful and thought-provoking poems, it is the conviction that while 'poetry may be the only heaven we have', it is life itself that must create the 'space of joy' which art wishes to celebrate. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

Throughout his long and prolific career, John Fuller has been admired for the way in which he melds levity with serious reflection.