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In recent months there have been two outstanding Collected
Poems - Anne Stevenson's from Bloodaxe
and now Gael Turnbull's from Shearsman, each showcasing the work of an
undoubtedly major writer. This statement made of Gael Turnbull may seem
strange to some readers. The fact is Turnbull tended to hide his light under
a bushel or crop up in unusual places. The Oxford Companion to
Twentieth Century Poetry (1994)
is ambivalent, considering some of his
writing 'inconsequential' but praising him for being 'low-key' and
'suspicious of rhetoric'.
He would almost certainly have been sympathetic to Cocteau's 'If a poet has a
dream it's not of being famous but of being believed.' He even went as far as
thinking poems ought to be published anonymously. In an Afterwords printed at the rear of this book he says 'A poem,
once made, must speak for itself. The hopes, ideas, difficulties or
circumstances of its maker may be of curiosity but are, in the end,
irrelevant.' Add to this the fact that Turnbull, as a doctor, worked for
several years in Canada and America and was more interested in American (in
particular William Carlos Williams) than he was in British poetry. He also
maintained an interest in the work of contemporary French poets, several of
whom he knew personally.
In literary-history terms he will be remembered for his Migrant Press which
fostered the what has been called the post-Poundian avant-garde, introducing
important American poets, principally the Black Mountain Poets, to the
British reading public. Now There are Words establishes him, in my judgement, as one of the
most original and significant poets of the last fifty years (as original and
significant as his fellow Scot, W.S. Graham, whom in one or two poems he can
resemble). The book represents a substantial and masterly body of work. The
pity is Gael isn't here to witness its publication (he had been working
towards a Selected Poems)... though
knowing him and the modesty with which he handled his poems he would almost
certainly have played down what this review and, I hope, others will help
readers recognise as the quality of his achievement. Jill, Gael's wife, and
Tony Frazer of Shearsman
deserve much gratitude for the painstaking work that went into the
publication of There Are Words.
I first encountered Gael turnbull's work forty odd years ago in what may be
called 'alternative' anthologies - like Horovitz's The Children of
Albion - anthologies flying
anti-mainstream flags in the 50s and 60s. All this now says of him,
however, is that he was, and was to remain until his death two years ago at
the age of 76, not so much a maverick as someone determinedly independent. There
are Words makes this abundantly clear.
Turnbull - again like Graham - is a poet hard to place. You would be hard put
to play the game of characterising him in terms of influences. Though I've
mentioned William Carlos Williams and W. S. Graham, it is more a matter of
resemblance than influence. Here and there one captures other flavours - for
example Wallace Stevens - but my feeling that is these are fortuitous and say
more about the reader than the writer. Turnbull is from start to finish his
own man, constantly exploring, questioning and extending the ways of saying
things. The voice is authoritative and there from the very beginning; the mind at work is
unusually taut and deeply serious, with a tendency towards the aphoristic.
Imagine this book as a garden - like Ian Hamilton Finlay's - where you come
across poems cut into stones or carved on trees or benches that invite you to
sit on them. They offer surprises and delight.
Restlessly experimental - but never for its own sake - Turnbull was constantly
doing what Ezra Pound asked of poets at the beginning of the twentieth
century, namely to make it new. His range is very wide. He employed the long
line before C.K. Williams or Ciaran Carson; he experimented with prose-poems,
found-poems; he wrote ballads, poems meant to be read out loud, poems that deftly rhyme and ones that
deftly don't; he shaped poems on the page with varying line-lengths and
indentings; he used the spaces between lines and verses functionally; the
touch is sometimes light, sometimes profoundly earnest... what often starts
with a light touch can suddenly surprise you with a switch to something
heart-stoppingly serious, often taking you back to realise the full
significance of the poem's title. As say, in
"Nothing
was spared"
said the guide
"and no
one needed
the full cost
of this
monument."
['On the
Somme']
Such simplicity and directness are normally difficult to attain but Turnbull
does it again and again...almost haiku-like as in 'A Blindfold':
A blindfold
on a
condemned man:
the mercy
not to see
his eyes.
['A
Blindfold']
These are poems are there to make you realise meaning instantaneously or at
least recognise what the poet has realised.
The two poems so far quoted merely hint at the mind at work in this book and
do not of course give more than a flavour of the poet in a particular
thinking/writing mode at a particular moment. He is capable of much more
ambitious writing than they suggest, as in the splendid sequences 'Residues'
and 'Transmutations' or the rivettingly poignant explorations of love
relationships in the 1963 collection of poems called To You I
Write. Here is just a flavour from
'Perhaps if I begin':
I believe in
a very ordinary sense that you life has been a failure, and
and in a very extraordinary sense that you have succeeded.
I believe in
a very happy sense that you knew what you were doing,
and in a very sorry sense that you didn't know where it would lead
you.
I believe in
a very subtle sense that I will never come to an end with
you, and in a very coarse sense that I finished with you long ago.
I believe in
a very devout sense all that I believe, and in a very practical
sense that I will never be sure.
Again, seeming simplicity and directness conveying something utterly complex:
caring, inquisitive, with a metaphysical cast of mind, one that is able to
contemplate the darker side of things and yet retain a kind of stoicism in
facing them, as in this poem 'The Mistake':
I have lived
with my overcoat on
and my bags
packed, ready
for any
catastrophe -
But the
secret police haven't arrived
and the house
hasn't burned.
Worse,
nothing happens...
And the stars
dazzle the sky
above me and
smile
in secret.
On a personal note, I got to know Gael twenty years ago when he lived in
Malvern, then met up with him again some years later when he'd moved to
Ulverston, then after that to Edinburgh. We met several times and
corresponded regularly, offering each other poems for criticism. We are very
different poets but his criticism was always constructive, always helpful,
(as I hope was mine); as a man and friend, he was always gentle and modest.
It was a privilege to know him and he is much missed.
All in all, Gael is a maker (the old Scots word for poet), a constructor: he
constructed and exhibited what for the sake of simplicity I'll call
poem-machines; he invented poetry games, constantly exploring and
experimenting...or should I say fashioning, shaping, arranging words in
necessary order. This is not to suggest he is a mere fabricator of poems. In
the almost 500pp of this superb Collected Poems there isn't one dud piece, one poem that doesn't
have genuine poetic power and resonance. An independent, an original and, to
my mind, a major poet.
© Matt
Simpson 2006
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