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 allusion: there is the same sense here, as in the earlier poem, of hopelessness and spent energy, as the poet, collecting his pensioner's off-peak bus pass, sees in it the embodiment of something altogether more Stygian…. (p. 23)

Good as this, and companion poems like 'In His Sixty-Fifth Year' are, there is still, now and then, a vestigial aura of schoolmasterly beefiness left over from the days of 'Tiny Tears' and 'From the Joke Shop', when Fuller's muse was a rather saucier number. A mildly risible string of three-line stanzas describes buying a pair of trousers at the Plymouth branch of Debenham's, and there is a rueful, down-the-sleeve guffaw on the theme of the poet's dapper moustache. One doesn't, after all, ask him to eschew the jokey or the flip, but the balance here tilts heavily in favour of a moss-dampened, Hardyesque charnel gloom. Yet despite the denture-rattling authenticity of:

                Bits of me keep falling off;
                bits don't work properly

the paradox (if we go the whole way with Fuller's vision of his own decay) is that he has probably never excelled himself in sheer cohesion, resourcefulness and versatility. (pp. 23-4)