Author Description

This book gathers Gael Turnbull's poems of thirty years. It brings together poems from his two previous main collections, `A Trampoline' (1968) and `Scantlings' (1970), both published by Cape-Goliard, with more recent work published by various small presses, and some previously unpublished poems. Edward Lucie-Smith wrote that `His work has exercised a strong personal influence on the course taken by avant-garde poetry in England. His little Migrant Press provided a focus for the post-Poundian poets when these were entirely neglected and out of favour, and he was one of the principal links between the American Black Mountain Poets and this country, long before [they] got "taken up" on either side of the Atlantic and extensively imitated.' The individuality, variety and strength of Gael Turnbull's poetry is demonstrated in this collection. His poems are characterized by an unusually wide range of technical resource and invention, from formal songs and lyrics, through the persona, prose and collage poems, to the extended compositions of `Twenty Words, Twenty Days', `A Word/A Phrase' and `Residues'. While his work reflects a transatlantic background, and an affinity both human and formal with William Carlos Williams, the influence of modern French poetry can also be seen in his prose poems. If his poems are to be placed in any context, it is in that area of British poetry which is international in reference, as exemplified by Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid from an older generation, and Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Matthew Mead and Charles Tomlinson among his contemporaries.