A lot of [Brutus's Orchard] is taken up with occasional poems. Most short poems are occasional, I suppose, in that they take particular and possibly trivial situations as their starting points, but to be of any importance they should also expand on these situations, giving them some larger, yet definite, place in the writer's experience. Unfortunately, with a great many of Mr. Fuller's poems, we are left where we started, contemplating some either obvious or vaguely didactic comment on an ordinary occupation of no great significance.

The most surprising defect of his poetry may be connected with the nature of the didacticism—surprising in that Mr. Fuller is one of the most perceptive poetry reviewers in England. He has still not shaken off his dependence on an idiom borrowed from Auden, which he uses everywhere, from the bright slangy epithet ("the charming cyclists") to the whole conception of a poem (The Day). The attractive jargon partly conceals and partly accounts for the weakness of the many general statements. (pp. 378-79)

The faults of triviality, derivativeness, and facile pessimism, however, are shown up by some very real qualities: a power of accurate description, an accomplished urbanity of tone, and a sense of humor which is at its best in the Mythological Sonnets at the end. Too often the virtues are so mixed in with the vices that few of the poems are completely flawed or completely unflawed, but there are at least two poems which are real accomplishments: The Ides of March, with its fine control of irony; and (in spite of a slightly confused first stanza) Eclipse…. Roy Fuller at his best is a poet to be reckoned with, and there would be many more poems like these two if only he were to examine the general assumptions on which his despair is grounded—if he were to show us the general forces in action, instead of merely tagging on sententious comments about them. (pp. 379-80)