In rural Wales, wandering the dunes west of Pwllheli, John Fuller has carefully composed a letter on the subject of travel: warning against it, wondering about people’s presences and absences, and serenely admiring ‘the Wales of sheep and song’. Andrew Wynn Owen has replied with friendly enthusiasm, matching John’s poetic form and his musings on travel. Is it better to risk seeming ‘stay-at-home, | A stick in mud’ or ‘to pass life scared | Of stillnesses’?
AWOL is an infinitely charming collaboration between the eminent poet John Fuller, with his career spanning over 50 years, and bright young poet Andrew Wynn Owen, whose first pamphlet was published in 2014. The epistolary poems are composed in terza rima in tetrameter lines, reflecting both poets’ love of metre and fiendish formal challenges.
The book will be beautifully produced on heavy art paper, and with hand-drawn line illustrations and watercolours by Emma Wright.