The themes which preoccupy Roy Fuller in his poetry are nakedly, indeed oppressively, active in [The Carnal Island]. Most of Fuller's verse has, in one way or another, been about the role of the poet in a society that is hostile or indifferent to him; how absurd and tragic the discrepancy between the poet's art-life and his real life, between his grand therapeutic dreams and his actual social and political impotence. Can Freud and Marx be married? That classic worry of the 1930s has continued to provide Fuller with his basic subject matter, preventing him from either retreating into the personal or from striding out into the public. If the persona of his most recent poems has been one of disappointment and exhaustion, it has also seemed rather heroic; he is, after all, the only one of those many bright young men of theory who has not either...