
Best Scottish Poems 2005 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Gael Turnbull

Source

Editor's comment

Biography

The Words

… no by breid alane but by ilka wurd …

There's this need to make utterance        be heard, even understood
as I shape these words for you        gone into that silence from where
I still hear your words        as once you heard mine.

Did you believe        I wished only to believe
with you        and to believe we understood
each other?        who have shared the bread and the wine
as we have the air and the sun        and now these years
from childhood to this age        come at last to me also

and if your words        those we have from our forefathers
for that bread and that wine        are no longer those
I can use, I must believe        you also believe
they are only words        if necessary
in face of those questions        of that beyond where I would reach

with these, the given words        we find on our tongues
from which we can't escape        that I would not disown,
the familiar and necessary words        I received from you,
the unanswerable words        we share and always shall.

Source

First published in Chapman, No. 106. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gael Turnbull.

Editor's comment

Here the gap down the page creates both a pulse and a kind of questioning, hesitant tone so typical of Gael Turnbull’s modest, generous aesthetic. In the last years of his life he was writing work that matched or exceeded his lifetime best.

Biography

Gael Turnbull (1928-2004) was born in Edinburgh, where he lived after spending most of his working life as a doctor in England, Canada and the United States.

His poetry is characterized by an unusually wide range of technical resource and invention, extending to his recent kinetic poems (seen on the streets of Edinburgh during the Festival).

He published numerous books and pamphlets of poems, most recently Transmutations (Shoestring Press, 1997), A Rattle of Scree (Akros, 1997) and Might a shape of words (Mariscat, 2000). There are words: Collected Poems will be published by Shearsman Books in 2006.