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Ghosts
A play by the co-founder of 1970s Berkeley, California, based theatre company, The Blake Street Hawkeyes (Whoopi Goldberg, alumni).
- GenresPoetry
35 pages, Paperback
First published September 16, 2004
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November 11, 2020
I plucked this from the outdoor Honesty Bookshop shelves at Hay Castle in Hay-on-Wye back in September. I’d only read Fuller’s Flying to Nowhere, years ago, and not gotten much out of it, so I’m glad I tried his work again. These poems were wonderful and, to my surprise, the book is a signed copy (for just £1!). Even though the main themes are ageing and death, the verse feels vivacious rather than melancholy – it helps that the long sequence “Happy” is about a new baby. There is a sense of multiple familial generations: poems entitled “Great-grandfather” and “Grandfather,” and “We should give thanks to be living with infants. / They wake so early that it is still / Yesterday, and the house is still.”
Fuller marks what would have been his father’s 90th birthday in “Dates,” and in “Prescience” he muses on whether people get a premonition of their day of death – “To mourn throughout your life / That unknown day when you / Wake up for the last time / Is quite impossible” – taking as an example Virginia Woolf and the journal entries she wrote on 28 March for the years before she took her life. There are several beautiful reflections on the seasons. I especially liked “Flea Market,” set in Brussels and pondering the traces a life leaves behind: “All these objects that we believe / Define us: they ache already with / Our love, and their forgottenness.”
This is only 4 stars instead of 5 because (as happens so often with poetry collections) there are 5–10 poems that washed over me without leaving any impression, so the very high quality wasn’t sustained throughout.
Fuller marks what would have been his father’s 90th birthday in “Dates,” and in “Prescience” he muses on whether people get a premonition of their day of death – “To mourn throughout your life / That unknown day when you / Wake up for the last time / Is quite impossible” – taking as an example Virginia Woolf and the journal entries she wrote on 28 March for the years before she took her life. There are several beautiful reflections on the seasons. I especially liked “Flea Market,” set in Brussels and pondering the traces a life leaves behind: “All these objects that we believe / Define us: they ache already with / Our love, and their forgottenness.”
This is only 4 stars instead of 5 because (as happens so often with poetry collections) there are 5–10 poems that washed over me without leaving any impression, so the very high quality wasn’t sustained throughout.
Displaying 1 of 1 review