This new publication from Shearsman is a long overdue collection of reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a figure who is central to the world of 1960s Anglo-American poetry.
There is a section on Basil Bunting which includes an account of how Turnbull helped to bring about a meeting between Bunting and Peggy (she of ‘Fifty years a letter unanswered; / a visit postponed for fifty years’) as well as his own account of his visit to the poet of Wylam in the Winter of 1965.
There are essays/articles on Carlos Williams, Corman, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Burroughs and an excellent short piece on the publication of the Stuttgart edition of Olson’s Maximus Poems 1-10. Charles Tomlinson obtained his copies of the two Jonathan Williams volumes from Gael Turnbull as he records in his autobiographical sketches reprinted by Carcanet as American Essays: Making It New.
There is a section on British poets which includes essential work on Roy Fisher whose major poem, City, was first published by Turnbull’s Migrant Press in May 1961.
To register the Anglo-American connection within Turnbull’s work it is worth looking at issue 8, the last of his Migrant journals. It contains work by Edwin Morgan, Charles Olson, Anselm Hollo, Michael Shayer, Larry Eigner, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Roy Fisher.
As Jill Turnbull makes clear in her introductory comments Tony Frazer is responsible for the footnotes in the volume and they are absolutely spot on: unobtrusive but highly informative.
Tears in the Fence 