It is rare and difficult for any poet, young or old, to find a true voice; rarer and even more difficult to adopt a new one in the notoriously barren stretches of middle age. Yet this is what Roy Fuller has splendidly done in his New Poems. The voice is both true and new. It speaks from recognizably the same man as that of the Collected Poems … and Buff …, but with a directness of personal reference quite unexpected from Mr. Fuller, whose sequences of Mythological Sonnets, Meredithian Sonnets, To X and The Historian seemed to be leading him farther and farther from himself, perhaps as a necessary corrective to what he has called "the tyranny of the personal lyric" in recent poetry. These sequences were extremely well done, but they did seem to hold dangers of boxing the poet too constrictingly in elegant pre-ordained structures, and of confining inspiration in future to dyspeptic reflections drawn from books or of laboriously inventing a whole range of ad hoc personae.

Mr. Fuller has turned in on himself—a successful professional man in his mid-fifties, now pulled down by ill health and disappointed with what he has achieved. Yet it would be quite wrong to imagine that the result is anything like the "confessional" poetry we have come to recognize (and—some of us—distrust). The abandonment of strict forms and ingenious rhymes has not meant a blurring of focus. Such poems by Mr. Fuller as "In Memory of my cat Domino" and "Romance" are deceptively relaxed and low-keyed, but they do not lack art….

[One] must acknowledge the faults here too, of which Mr. Fuller is sometimes, though seldom, guilty: faults which are directly related to the virtues of his method. Self-revelation inevitably leads to self-dramatization, however scrupulous the admission of pose:

           Is it possible that anyone so silly can
           Write anything good?

Again, one is disarmed, but this sort of remark (from "Last Sheet") nudges one into a sort of indulgence which is embarrassing. One finds it towards the end of "Chinoiserie", charming, self-deprecating, honest, but diminishing too. It is the price that has to be paid for choosing to "tell all", and the fidelity of such a mirror is not to be questioned…. These poems force one into asking severely moral questions, of art and of oneself. That they do so in such a disquieting way is, quite apart from their great skill, a sign of their importance.