Gael Turnbull:
For Whose Delight
Gael Turnbull, For Whose Delight. Mariscat Press, 3 Mariscat Road, Glasgow G41 4ND. 64pp A5. ISBN 0 946588 16 3.
A selection of Turnbull's poems from the last ten years. For a book which opens with images of the artist as circus performer, Turnbull is more interested in the precariousness of the balancing act than in the applause: there's a great sympathy here for those who persist in the not strictly 'natural' or 'neccessary' activity, be it the horseback acrobat of A Voltige Act, or the Racing Walker, ferocious in his intransigence. Much found and modified language appears in the book, a kind of fascination with words as objects which can survive or be lost as surely as any other records of human presence: There Are Words moves from translations of the Gaelic words for, for instance "little walks which an invalid could be expected to take", to speculation on which of our words might persist to bewilder our remote descendents. A visit to a launderette yields a whole vocabulary in A Poem Containing, with its injuction to press the words "(it distinctly says pressing the words)" to define your wash. Turnbull's Texturalist Poems ("in the sense of making a fresh pattern or texture, previously only implicit, from an already existing text") range from poems on the dismal conditions of mine-workers in 1813, through a recipe for Cobalt blue from Josiah Spode's notebooks, to moving, resigned musings from two series of personal letters. Throughout, there's a sensitivity to the minimal alteration -- a humility in the face of both language and life which knows that the tiniest actions can have untold consequences, and that a writer's personality can express itself equally well through selection as in (his or her) "own words". Which words are yours? All this plus the wonderful, elegaic Impellings, and The Daughter of Alastair Ruadh : "when forbidden to make songs/both indoors and out/began to make them/half in and half out."
This review first appeared in issue 6 of Object Permanence magazine.
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