John Fuller

John Fuller Poems

The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate.
...

Be careful not to crush
This scalloped tenement:
Who knows what secrets
Winter has failed to find
...

He is a drunk leaning companionably
Around a lamp post or doing up
With intermittent concentration
Another drunk's coat.
...

The butterfly, alive inside a box,
Beats with its powdered wings in soundless knocks
And wishes polythene were hollyhocks.
...

5.

You don’t listen to what I say.
When I lean towards you in the car
You simply smile and turn away.
...

From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles,
The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last
Riot of the senses, is only a short pass.
...

He went to the city and goosed all the girls
With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills
To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally,
One head in my chambers and one up your alley
...

Ar. Now you have been taught words and I am free,
My pine struck open, your thick tongue untied,
And bells call out the music of the sea.
...

Think of a self-effacing missionary
Tending the vices of a problem tribe.
He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri
And how to take a bribe.
...

Fingers:
Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets.
We, active, differentiate the digits:
Whilst you are merely little toe and big
...

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim—Corse-Matin (6.8.94)

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim
Pendant la grande canicule.
...

Father’s opinion of savages
And dogs, a gay Bloomsbury epigram:
‘The brutes may possibly have souls,’ he says,
‘But reason, no. Nevertheless, I am
...

When they confess that they have lost the penial bone and outer space is
Once again a numinous void, when they’re kept out of Other Places,
...

The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees.
The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions.
He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant
Of all banalities of village life,
...

John Fuller Biography

John Fuller is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford. Fuller was born in Ashford, Kent, England, the son of poet and Oxford Professor Roy Fuller, and educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford. He began teaching in 1962 at the State University of New York, then continued at the University of Manchester. From 1966-2002 he was a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford; he is now Fellow Emeritus. He has published 15 collections of poetry, including Stones and Fires (1996), Now and for a Time (2002) and the recent Song and Dance (2008). Chatto and Windus published a Collected Poems in 1996. His novel Flying to Nowhere (1983), a historical fantasy, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 1996 he won the Forward Prize for Stones and Fires and in 2006 the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. He has also written collections of short stories and several books for children. His poem Ship of Sounds, illustrated with a wood engraving by the artist Garrick Palmer, was published in 1981 in an edition of 130 by Gruffyground Press. In 1968, John Fuller established the Sycamore Press, which he ran from his garage. The Sycamore Press published some of the most influential and critically acclaimed poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, such as W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin and Peter Porter. In addition to these established authors, the Press sought to promote younger poets, many of whom have gone on to achieve great success. The Sycamore Press ceased operations in 1992, and is an excellent example of a British small press, publishing for motives other than profit. John Fuller and the Sycamore Press (Bodleian Library, 2010) includes an interview with John Fuller and personal reflections by Sycamore Press authors about Fuller, the press and the works it produced. The book also includes a bibliography of the pamphlets and broadsides Fuller produced. John Fuller is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.)

The Best Poem Of John Fuller

Valentine

The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like to successfully guess your weight and win you at a fte.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders, too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I’d like all your particulars in folders marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath) in rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work, on hinges.

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I’d like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I’d like to give you just the right amount and get some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you nod and hold a teacup. I like your legs when you unwind
them.
Even in trousers I don’t mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.
I like the little crease behind them.
I’d always know, without a recap, where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I’d like to cross two hemispheres and have you chase me.
I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt and cancelling other dates.
I’d like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I’d let you put insecticide into my wine.
I’d even like you if you were the Bride of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde.
I’d even like you as my Julian of Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of boolean mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I’d like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin. And see you grin.
I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin,
I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence.
I’d like to be your second look.
I’d like to let you try the French Defence and mate you with my rook.
I’d like to be your preference and hence
I’d like to be around when you unhook.
I’d like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book, your future tense.

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