GrThe launch of Equal Night; a new collection of poems by Graham Fulton, published by Salmon Poetry.
Street Level Photoworks, Sat 16 Sep 7pm
Death is the great taboo. We don’t like to talk about it or think about it. We try to hide from the brutal fact that someday we’re going to come to an end. Everything suddenly stops.
Equal Night is a sequence of poems that chooses to face the reality of dying head on. It’s about someone experiencing the death of a loved one, moving through the events before, during and after. It’s a personal journey among billions of others, but one that becomes ultimately universal as it embraces each of tangled within the bewildering condition of being alive.
‘His myriad sometimes quirky tabulation of objects fashions and local people in action has made Graham Fulton's poetry a distinct personal telling of urban culture in the west of Scotland. Now this previously sometimes detached, sometimes sardonic voice has recorded a journey through the experience of seeing the onset of terminal illness, hospitalisation and death of a mother. I think the cumulative effect is extraordinary, the most convincing, honest, matter of fact and unsettling account of the nitty-gritty of "going through the daily motions" of confronting death and the estrangement of close family bereavement that I have read, certainly in my own culture. Graham Fulton's poetry sequence carries the unmistakeable truth of genuine necessary art.' - Tom Leonard
Graham Fulton has been writing poetry for 31 years. His 11 published full-length books are Humouring the Iron Bar Man (Polygon, 1990), Knights of the Lower Floors (Polygon, 1994), Open Plan (Smokestack Books, 2011), Full Scottish Breakfast (Red Squirrel Press, 2011), Reclaimed Land (The Grimsay Press, 2013), One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich (Smokestack Books, 2014), Photographing Ghosts (Roncadora Press, 2014), Continue (Penniless Press Publications, 2015), Edible Transmitters (Bibliotecha Universalis (Romania), 2015), Brian Wilson in Swansea Bus Station (Red Squirrel Press, 2015) and Paragraphs at the End of the World (Penniless Press Publications, 2016).
Banner Image: © Graham Fulton
Left Image: © Iseult Timmermans