"Notes on Sea and Land’ is intensely visual. Imagery of water, sometimes comforting, sometimes threatening, predominates. The earth is her base element though, and the detail remains precise, whether it’s plants, stones, reptiles, insects or birds. There are human beings too, but they’re no more predictable than the tides."

 Helena Nelson, HappenStance Press

"A hauntingly spare collection. I use ‘spare’ as praise here, because it is the lack of over-arching sureness and the comfort in gritty details in poems like ‘Echo Wing’, where a visitor is “tasting/ the salt still on her skin”, that allows these lives to linger, uncertain yet brave in our minds."

Matt Merritt  Sphinx, Poetry Pamphlet Reviews and Features. www.sphinxreview.co.uk 

Before I read
my mother’s diaries
what I need to say to myself is this:
don’t squander this one chance
of reaching them fresh, unread
by anyone but her. Hold back
till you’re ready to touch her words,
to empty your head.
Here they are. Feel their spines.
Worn smooth. The rub of years.
The blue one, the red one, the green,
the one with the flush of flowers.
Finger a page. The rush of vowels.
Familiar flourish of an F or a J.

 From Ampersand

Estuary was inspired by the River Yar Estuary in the west the Isle of Wight. The owners of the surrounding farm preserved the estuary in its natural state, treating the tidal area as a wild life sanctuary. The text has four elements: diary observations, poem meditations, the voices of those who work on the land and paintings and drawings by artist Colin Riches.

‘’This is amphibious writing, moving effortlessly between richly detailed prose notes and the poems in which shapes and pauses play their parts. You read on and it makes less and less sense to draw a distinctions; they are facets of a sensibility adept at holding differences in balance – between the inner and the outer, between practicality and imagination, speaking and listening, human and natural, and between a close prison world and the wide sky and water. As Keats suggested, maybe the ability to embrace such opposites is poetry.’’

Philip Gross

"The book is part nature daybook – a diary of visits to the estuary, interactions with it over the course of a year – but also a poetry collection.   It also has elements of deeply personal memoir. One of the book’s strengths is that Fulleylove cannot bracket off her personal relations (an aging father during illness), her job as a creative writing tutor at HMP Isle of Wight, nor indeed the politics which sees one of the estuary’s farms carefully dismantled during her period of residency in the area. It is all of a part, each element a channel or rivulet in the book’s flow outwards. Fulleylove and Riches employ sensory information as a key part of their work here."

In one poem, the artist is observed at work:

Dung, mud, ink. The artist makes
the cow in the winter barn,
legs tucked under like a cat,
tail pressed close. Black eye watchful,
nostrils and ears flared. Long after
she is gone, these marks will call up her absence,
draw her presence out of dark.

"Most powerfully, the estuary is brought indoors in order to engage prisoners with an external environment they cannot access. Among the artefacts offered to prisoners are leaves: ‘What the men most want to do with the leaves is to smell them. a leaf passed round nose to nose.’  Sensory apprehension again."

David Borthwick, Ecoarts Scotland

By the broken jetty
which staggers out
into the river
we settle on the bench
my father hunched
wool cap shading his eyes

I chatter and fret
leave him
and feel for the thin path
between reeds
flickery, purple-headed

reeds criss-cross
tickle my neck
I brush in-out
of pools of dark
dense as sleep –

back, beside the jetty
the tide creeps out
mud, bladderwrack, sticks
stumps of jetty growing
salt on the wind
water smooths
skims, retreats
signs off
in a silver channel
a backwards S

black-tailed godwit feed
my father is quiet
I am quiet, I have stopped
my father looks up
he looks out

when we walk away he says
it’s not a pushing kind of place
it’s a gentle place
we see the gleam of mud
the godwit lifting delicate-jointed legs