Shearsman Books

Paperback, 496pp, 9x6ins, £18.95 / $30
ISBN 9780907562894

Gael Turnbull – poet, doctor, performer and morris-dancer – was for many years a transatlantic poetic nexus in the UK, both through his own work, and through his pioneering Migrant Press, founded in 1957, an early outlet for figures such as Roy Fisher and Edward Dorn. This Collected gathers almost all of Gael Turnbull's published poetry as well as a selection of uncollected and unpublished works.

'I heard that Charles Tomlinson's first response to the news of Gael Turnbull's sudden death was, "I owe everything to Gael!" Those words could have been mine. Gael was my friend for almost fifty years and without his interest I would have foundered early. To instruct, or even guide, was not his way. Instead he would simply bear you company through unmapped territory across which he too had his path to find. After some years you would find yourself in an unsuspected clearing where you could proceed to work in your own way. This is what happened to me. Gael still stayed near, entertained by the divergence in our writings. He marked it by maintaining, by means of a stream of cuttings, the fiction that without ever leaving town I was the secret author of the Nature Jottings in every newspaper he came across.

"Of all my lost friends he is the least dead. The unique pace of his mind, sometimes troubled, always curious, seems still to be keeping us company somewhere just out of reach.' (Roy Fisher)

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