Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The poems of the quietly but firmly experimental poet, concerned to testify lyrically to the experiences of the apparently “ordinary”.

   In one of Turnbull’s early poems, “An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne, about 650 AD”, published in 1956, the speaker of the title observes “the patience of the bricklayer / is assumed in the dream of the architect.” For Turnbull’s longer poems there is a sense of that architect not so much dreaming as setting out a pre-determined over-arching idea for the poem which the attentive detail of the craftsman must then bring to realisation: Turnbull is dreamer, designer and specialist artisan all in one. In “Perhaps if I begin”, first collected in To You I Write (1963), the proposition of the poem is the act of writing itself, starting “Perhaps if I begin here this evening and go onward hopefully towards whatever kind of statement you might lead me into”. As the poem proceeds it enriches its own conceptual enquiry with human urgency: “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.”

   “Twenty Words, Twenty Days” (1966) introduces a random element – each of its twenty sections is inspired by a randomly chosen word from the dictionary – that is crossed with improvisations based on the poet’s experiences of the day in question, including what he was reading. By treating his material in an oblique way the effect is not especially autobiographical, an approach about which Turnbull had serious reservations. Rather, in a way that is reminiscent of the passion-guarding extremity in Samuel Beckett’s later monologues, an elided narrative dramatically comes through. This achieves a high emotional resonance from re-cast pieces originally uttered in a range of registers but which are now merged and pulse through in different line lengths and line positions: “did I dial the right number? did I dial it correctly? or if dialled, did the / number go through? and etcetera…/ at war with distance, and a / gadget - / in quest? or on a ramble? – / to find a place knowable, / circumscribed, having identity - .”

   Other experiments follow, always with that attention to human drama. Formally, Turnbull was especially interested in a binary structure that might imply a third almost revelatory line of thinking without actually stating it. Hence his invention of the two line “space” form that literally builds in thinking space in the middle of the poem, and the striking two-paragraph “Transmutations”, in which a perception of a human relationship is transformed by the ‘pivot’ of the silence between the paragraphs. Gael Turnbull’s poetry also has a sense of fun, and a charming tenderness. His work appeared mostly through little and fine presses: brilliant to see it gathered here, too.