The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love (and the failures and compromises that accompany that desire) in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. It begins with Petrarch, who created great lyric poetry out of an impossible infatuation, and moves through Coleridge’s self-induced guilt within domestic happiness, Matthew Arnold’s disbelief in mutual love, Brahm’s self-delusion and the complexities of Wallace Stevens’s marriage. It so happens that both Brahms and Arnold found themselves contemplating their art and their lives in the small Swiss town of Thun, and it is Thun that provides the setting for the wonderful concluding poem of this collections in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyood and his parents' marriage.
If there is any resolution in this sequence of magnificently playful and thought-provoking poems, it is the conviction that while ‘poetry may be the only heaven we have’, it is life itself that must create the ‘space of joy’ which art wishes to celebrate.
John Fuller's latest collection of poetry, Ghosts, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. He is also a respected novelist: his fiction includes Flying to Nowhere (1983), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Look Twice (1991), The Worm and the Star (1993) and A Skin Diary (1997). His books written for children include The Last Bid (1975) and The Extraordinary Wool Mill and Other Stories (1980). The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole, by Herself (2001), is a portrait of the eighteenth-century painter, philosopher and femme fatale.
John Fuller is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford.
