Martin TURNER

Martin TURNER Poems

Martin TURNER Biography

Raised in Post-War plenty, I could hear the chains of concentration camps rattling somewhere close by; but we children of the earnest fifties were soon etched by the permissions of 1965-1975; when these unwelcome hallucinations faded, so did many other false values; but patiently, like grass growing under a still-burning city, a Christian Taoist existentialism came to redeem an otherwise trite life. After a psychology degree at Exeter University, I trained as a teacher and, in Scotland, as an educational psychologist. In psychology I have edited, authored and co-authored four books, including Psychological Assessment of Dyslexia (Whurr,1997) and Dyslexia Guidance (with Philippa Bodien: nferNelson,2007) , as well as numerous chapters and articles. As regards poetry – always a longer purpose - in 1992 I published Trespasses with Faber and Faber and in 2006 The Deer of Tamniès with PublishAmerica. My wife, a friend and I published translations from the modern Persian during the 1980s. Both poetry and translations have won prizes.)

The Best Poem Of Martin TURNER

Atlantic Memoir

Night comes and the clenching of teeth.
Gone the ricercare of the birds.
A baroque sky of shell and pearl
gives way to one of dark silk.

Do you remember the man in the brown suit,
sipping his coffee in a shop by the front,
wandering with seven faces in the century’s mirrors,
now fêted in the bars along the sea?

In his verses the sea breathed,
the sea of the sweeping sleeve,
the sea sipping at the land,
the sea washing as an afterthought.

Inscrutable as a cat with the tail of a mouse
still hanging at the corner of its mouth,
he made known the little charades of home,
each smoking ancient grudge.

Among loud minds he walked like a blind person
while the moon muddied her tides with rage.
When he spoke it snowed in our bones.
We were exiles lost in the sky.

Our distant talk was a dull concussion of blunders.
Finally we succumbed to the canons of dull health.
How the gods of wood and stream
suffer from being known.

We were little clots under the stars,
our faces agog with the sun’s last glow.
We sat over backgammon while he braved the void,
his face pitted with meteor thoughts.

In his verses the sea breathed,
sea lapping the spit in little seething rushes,
hesitant, followed by digressions,
lapsing in an immense, perjured stillness.

Sirens fill the electric night.
Dawn clings to the air like silk.
We talk to each other through our books.
And in the morning the city is still there.

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