A layer of glum senescence covers Roy Fuller's latest collection of poems [The Reign of Sparrows] like a fall of volcanic ash. There is plenty here about movement, growth and vitality, but the drift is distinctly that of an unburdened crawl towards death…. Almost the entire final section of the book is dedicated to the business of reckoning with the onset of old age. Being 65 is viewed, not, as in Auden's case, with quietly smirking triumph, but with a sense of tremulous astonishment at having got there at all and a distinct apprehensiveness as to going any further.

Finest of all the poems on this theme, and among the best things Fuller has ever done, is 'On His Sixty-Fifth Birthday', a free imitation of Arnold's 'Rugby Chapel', with a significant halfway nod in the direction of the original. More than simple skeins of curt pindarics create the Arnoldian...