Roy Fuller celebrated his seventieth birthday in February of 1982. The only public manifestations I have noted (although there will certainly have been things I missed) were a longish interview on Radio 3, Poems for Roy Fuller on his seventieth birthday published by John Fuller's Sycamore Press (which can perhaps be seen more as a private than a public gesture), and this selected poems which must consequently be considered as the principal event by which the occasion is to be honoured. Since he has published more than thirty books, been made a C B.E , Oxford Professor of Poetry, Governor of the B.B.C., Chairman of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council, clearly he is a writer who has been fully recognised by our society, and thus poses a large question as to what that recognition is worth.

The first thing one notices about this book is that it seems to be attempting to conceal the fact that it is a volume of poetry, the title suggesting that it may be a book about poetry or some other species of problem literature which may well lead to a good discussion in the extra-mural class or a good fog in the head back at home. It consists of 85 pages of poems (in a generous print, which is nice to have although it means we get only 62 poems, probably less than a tenth of his output), followed by 11 pages of notes and preceded by a three-page ...