Now and for a Time
by John Fuller
64pp, Chatto & Windus, £8.99

If poets were drinks, what drinks would they be? As an exercise in whimsy the question has the makings of a good John Fuller poem, along the lines of the "Two Hysterical Phantasies on the Names of Poets" in Fuller and James Fenton's co-authored collection Partingtime Hall.

Ted Hughes could be a good Yorkshire bitter, Geoffrey Hill communion wine, Seamus Heaney sloe gin and Paul Muldoon pink champagne. As for John Fuller, he could only be a bottle of port or claret at an Oxford high table. There is a poem in Now and for a Time dedicated to Al Alvarez, but Alvarez's famous slogan "the gentility principle" probably encapsulates many readers' feelings about Fuller's work.

From his earliest poems in the 1950s he has assumed a tone of cultured knowingness, keeping his rationalist's head in the 60s when all around were losing theirs, cultivating a polished, witty style that looks back to Auden but also to Browning, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll: the consummate all-rounder. "Look John, I trust your sense of tact," Fenton wrote to him in "Letter to John Fuller", lampooning post-Plath sensationalism. Fuller was never going to become the Plath or Sexton of Magdalen College, then or now. Now and for a Time, his 14th collection of poetry, shows the old urbanity and tact as firmly in place as ever.

In The Deregulated Muse Sean O'Brien reads Fuller as an English postmodernist, a description which must have left readers of Jeremy Prynne and the Conductors of Chaos poets scratching their heads in disbelief. Yet for all his disreputably mainstream trappings, Fuller does have some claim on the term as the most incurably ludic of writers.

He is fascinated by games and rituals, and all the linguistic implications of following or breaking the rules. As he has Ariel say in an early dialogue poem, "Language is for the coward / Who thinks a rule is nice / At any price", which moves Caliban to protest: "O then unteach me language [.] Teach me how to break the rule".

Now and for a Time is firmly on Ariel's side, opening with a poem in seven sections, "Birth Bells for Louisa", which makes extensive use of one of Fuller's favourite techniques over the years: refrain. The ceremonial touch, though, scarcely manages to invest Fuller's burnished salutations with much excitement: "The awaited moment is almost with us", "Hope is attendant like an arrow", "Fruit falls when the fruit is ready".

Such familial pieties are always nice, but not at any price. A few Calibanesque rumblings might at least have provided some dramatic tension. Now and for a Time does have its darker moments, but saves them for its second half. In the meantime Fuller continues in celebratory, even exuberant mood in Gallic-flavoured poems like "Le Train Malin", "Aigrette Garzette to Echasse Blanche" and "Piano Concerto". Wallace Stevens liked nothing better than topping off his poems with some nonsense or polyglot icing, and if the hoots of "Lullabaloo - lullabaloo" in "Le Train Malin" sound like something from Harmonium, Fuller goes one better in "Mosaïque Macaronique" with two lines in every four in French.

In "Words" Fuller hails the aloofness of words, "unwoundable as angels", ticking off the naivety of innocent liberals including, presumably, the poet himself:

As Bellow said, this is
The difficulty with people who spend their
Lives in humane studies and
Therefore imagine once cruelty has been described
In books it is ended.

As often with Fuller the Auden note is clearly detectable here, but a lingering sympathy for his gullible humanists seems undeniable. The alternative, to turn his back on them altogether and write a poem as hard and unbending as Sylvia Plath's "Words" ("Words dry and riderless, / The indefatigable hoof-taps") would not be Fuller's style.

At their most whimsical Fuller's poems are little more than parlour games, their extensive use of repetition alternately playful and grindingly forced. There is plenty of music in Now and for a Time, as in "String Quartet", whose cello revealingly opts for technique over passion:

Unloved, unloving, savagely I must climb
Out of self-pity. Passion is deferred.
I am rock. I am driven. I am pure notation.

"The execution was faultless", Fuller writes of a piano concerto. Perhaps he should experiment with some deliberately bum notes now and then, if only for variety's sake. In "How", too, the mix of Audenesque personification and catalogue structure quickly finds itself running on empty ("And here's a thing, and here's a thing"). It is only with "When I Am Dead" that Fuller reminds us he means business, turning his back on the social bustle of the previous poems to speak from a "non-place that is nothing".

But it is the collision of final things with all that has gone before that is of most interest to Fuller, as explored in "Round and Round", a 21-page meditation on ageing and marriage that completes the book's long arc from youth to age.

Fuller's weakness, once again, for syntactic repetitions becomes almost obsessive ("I crashed the gears. I hit the ditch. / I muffed the shot. I missed the red..."). Fuller is as uxorious a poet as they come: hiatuses in the couple's mutual understanding are overcome with such rapidity as to be hardly worth mentioning in the first place ("How easy, this ability / To lose whatever we possess / By ceasing to believe that we / Deserve such brilliant success").

He attempts to widen the picture to take in the decline and fall of the welfare state, but has obviously been blessed with far too happy a marriage for anything as sordid as politics to distract him very long. The poem ends with the "civilising glow" of their cottage in Wales beckoning the couple down from the hillside to the pleasures of sleep, in which man and wife's "voyaging dreams are bound / Over and over, round and round". The circularity has become self-fulfilling.

The walk in "Round and Round" is one "in which the setting out / Defined the end it brought about." Accomplished as it is, Now and for a Time would make for a more compelling journey if fewer of its poems seemed committed to such a predetermined itinerary.

Fuller's 1996 collection Stones and Fires stands out from the rest of his oeuvre for its very unwhimsical portrayal of grief at the death of his father, in poems like "The Garden", "Star-Gazing" and the marvellous "A Cuclshoc", and was rewarded with that year's Forward prize. Now and for a Time is on the shortlist this year - the results are announced on National Poetry Day, October 10 - but nothing in it vibrates at anything like the same intensity. Nonetheless, Fuller has continued to write as no one doubts he can: with dry urbanity and unflappable abundance. These are solid virtues as far as they go, but they hardly need another Forward prize.

· David Wheatley is co-editor of Metre magazine