Asleep and Awake

An elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John Fuller

In this personal and characteristically brilliant new collection from John Fuller, an abundance of memories abound. From “those once endless years” of a childhood in wartime – tasting of Granny’s chicken soup, twizzers and cherry-go-rips – to the pattern of family and friendships, important milestones are brought to vivid life. In ‘Before We Met – and After’ a sequence of recollections cherish a wife on her eightieth birthday; ‘In Whose Head’ a piece by Schumann is revisited through advancing years; and in ‘Keeper of the Fire’ and ‘In Memory of John Bayley’ late poems of remembrance memorialise lost friends.

These are poems of being and time, full of lyric feeling and Fuller’s distinctive wit and lightness of touch. Alive with the clang and sway of the “chosen colours of daily family life”, together they form a resonant gathering of poems that celebrate, with thoughtfulness and joy, “the feel and length of our lives”.