Name Gael Turnbull | Role Poet | |
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Died July 2, 2004, Herefordshire, United Kingdom Education University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge Books There Are Words, While Breath Persist, A winter journey, More Words: Gael Turn, A rattle of scree | ||
"An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne About 650AD" by Gael Turnbull
Gael Turnbull (7 April 1928 – 2 July 2004) was a Scottish poet who was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival.
Turnbull was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the North of England and in Canada, where he moved with his parents at the beginning of World War II. He studied Natural Science at Cambridge University and graduated in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951.
As a doctor and anaesthetist, he worked in Ontario; London, England; Ventura, California; Worcester; and Barrow-in-Furness.
His poetry first appeared in a book in Canada in 1954. Trio, an anthology of poems by Eli Mandel, Gael Turnbull, and Phyllis Webb published by Raymond Souster's Contact Press. His poems also appeared in Origin, Cid Corman's magazine.
In 1957, Turnbull started Migrant Press, one of the first British-run presses to focus on poets in the modernist tradition. His work was featured in the groundbreaking Revival anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). His own books include A Gathering of Poems 1950-1980 (1983) and Rattle of Scree: Poems (1997). He was also published in the anthologies The New British Poetry (1988), Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (1999) and Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001).
He returned to Edinburgh after he retired from medical practice in 1989. In this city, he worked on what he termed kinetic poems; texts for installation in which the movement of the reader and/or of the text became part of the reading experience. He died on a visit to Herefordshire of a sudden brain haemorrhage.
In 2006, Turnbull's collected poems, There Are Words, were published by Shearsman Books.