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 grand gestures and resonances…. [The] charmlessness is deliberate, part of Fuller's challenge. The low-key tone and awkwardness, the mass of odd titbits and facts, the endless caution and self-qualification—these are the price you have to pay for authenticity. Fuller has always been fond of, and is nowadays almost tediously insistent on, regular and disciplined verse-forms; yet it's when he's at his most formal that he comes nearest to speaking most openly.

As this might suggest, the relatively informal mode of the autobiography isn't one that particularly suits Fuller: as a 'memoir of childhood and youth', Souvenirs has not a great deal of range and is not very outspoken. True, the seemingly key events of his early years are present, principal among them his father's death….

Though there's plentiful detail in the account (food, clothes, musical tastes, reading habits) and extensive, indeed excessive attention to school friends and relations, much remains unsaid. For this Fuller blames a failing memory … but there's also a tendency to back away from the emotions surrounding family deaths like that of his father and brother. At key shy-making moments Fuller's 'I' takes refuge in the more impersonal 'one'…. And though in small ways self-deprecating throughout, Fuller doesn't in the end give the impression of searing honesty about painful memories or weaknesses. The faults he concedes often sound suspiciously like virtues, self-laceration like a sly pat on the back: at one point he accuses himself of being 'shy, intellectual, naive to the point of gormlessness (archetypally poetic, one might say)', and at another of 'too great a facility for seeing another's point of view, an almost morbid concern for another's feelings'.

Given that the book is concerned mainly with the early years of Fuller's life, and that he can't in any case take the matter very seriously, it would have been rash to expect from Souvenirs any very serious account of Fuller's political development…. [The] crucial passage on Fuller's politics runs as follows:

Why one should always want to ally oneself with the underdog is not altogether clear. One is tempted to discount utterly any virtue in the matter: I mean why should trying to see that a certain one-clawed pigeon gets more than its fair share of bread on the lawn … reflect creditably on the bread-scatterer?

Anyone who has read more than a handful of Fuller's poems will find the bird-feeding analogy entirely in character. His poetic persona is a great taker-in of birds: whether they've fallen out of nests or are lying half-dead in the road, feathered friends have always been able to rely on Fuller to appear and relieve them of their distress. Fuller implies here that his early socialism was motivated by the same impulse of pity for the underprivileged, but the passage more properly places him within a tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition in which enlightened youthful paternalism almost invariably gives way to the disillusioned conservatism of age. Benevolence in one's back garden is better than no benevolence at all, of course, and throughout both these books Fuller emerges as a decent, thoughtful man. But it seems a pity that the more ambitious, public voice of the early work proved no more than a fad of the time.