The Reign of Sparrows is not quite as good as either [Brutus's Orchard or New Poems], but there is plenty in it to remind [Roy Fuller's] admirers just how varied, skilful and surprising he can be. Three opening poems in his lengthy, reflective manner (a bit Hardyesque these days in "Ghost Voice") remain rather arcane and uncomfortable after several readings; but "Sloth Moth" sees him away into a favourite later theme, the oddities and ironies of natural history; and "Musical Offering" takes him back again to the old preoccupation with creation and execution in the other art he most admires. I wonder when we are going to realise that Fuller in his sixties (and on the subject of his sixties) is one of the most varied, accomplished, alternately disturbing and entertaining poets we have—none the worse for the sprightly oddities his style has acquired in recent years?… [The] splendid centrepiece of this book [is] the set of poems written "In his Sixty-fifth Year." There is nothing small in these perceptions, which come in a kind of diary-sequence stretching from October 1976 to the summer of 1977—and offer a rueful, touching commentary on the concerns of the poet in his unsatisfied, un-Horatian old age. (p. 58)

Souvenirs, Roy Fuller's memoir of his childhood and youth, is in many respects a companion volume to The Reign of Sparrows, sharing the preoccupations of the verse. Fuller's later prose style owes much to the clipped, idiosyncratic cadences of many of the poems. It also owes more than a little to the prose style of Anthony Powell, especially the insertion of the deadpan authorial comment…. The book is a very funny, occasionally very moving, account of Fuller's respectable, yet reduced and itinerant lower middle-class childhood, in Lancashire (mainly Blackpool); a world of pier performers and Hallé concerts, private hotels and waning private schools, of Lawrence's Nettles taken into law lectures during his solicitor's training. It's a reticent book but not at all an unrevealing one: the quirks and peculiarities of distant relations, lost music-hall artistes and windswept, humble places, are cherished so delicately and recalled in such detail as to amount to a love for, and celebration of, an expansive world which the shy youth (and the man) feels guiltily he has never wholly managed to re-enter. (pp. 58-9)