Though [Souvenirs] is a prose memoir and [The Reign of Sparrows] a book of poems, they form two halves of the same sexagenarian drama. There are the same themes: tributes to dead friends and relatives, reflections on music and poetry, and above all preoccupation with age—its destruction of the body … and its surprising consolations…. The same voice informs both volumes—a voice with many different tones (in turns it is confessional and evasive, immodest and self-deprecating, dry-as-dust and wetly sentimental), but which remains at all times relaxed and chatty, no less so in the poems than the poetry.

Fuller has been called a poet who is 'safe', 'trim', 'tidy', 'conventional' (some underhand allusion to the fact that he made his living as a solicitor often lies at the back of such adjectives), but there's actually a great deal of risk-taking in his poetry's flatness, its eschewal of...