There are Words... : Collected Poems

"There are words" is the long-awaited summary of Scottish poet Gael Turnbull's poetic career. A major figure in post-war British verse, Gael Turnbull (1928-2004) was at the centre of a nexus of Anglo-American poetic activity in the 1950s and 1960s, occasioned by the fact that he was one of the few poets who actually moved to and fro across the Atlantic in those years, and by his stewardship of the pioneering small press, Migrant. After his return to the UK in the early 1960s, he worked as a general practitioner and anaesthetist until his retirement. His own work covered an enormous range, from modernist experiment to performance work, from visual material meant for public display to short amusing ballads. A true original, the scale of his achievement has been obscured until now by the fact that his major books have long been out of print and that a good deal of his work appeared in limited editions from small presses.