Marston Meadows

‘A magnificent and tender celebration of long love and of abundant nature’ Ian McEwanFrom the Forward prizewinning poet, a witty and nostalgic collection that celebrates the companionship of marriage, the small joys of growing old, and the ever-illuminating beauty of the English countryside** Including the poem that inspired Ian McEwan's novel What We Can Know **'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?’