Gael Turnbull is a British poet of considerable and various achievement, a friend of poets and a small publisher. His poetry is experimental and adventurous in style, yet it speaks with a clear, consistently recognizable, and always poetic voice. His transatlantic connections and affinities have been important to him, both personally and in his writing, and he has had a steadily widening group of devoted readers on both sides of the Atlantic, many of them poets, who have admired the assurance and vivacity of his style, the variety of his rhythms--always kept in hand by a sensitive and decorous ear--and the compassion and seriousness that underlay the normal geniality of his tone. His writing has been almost entirely poetry, except for some short theatrical pieces.

Gael Lundin Turnbull's background is Scottish. He was born in Edinburgh in 1928. His father, Ralph Gale Turnbull, is a Scot, born in Berwick-upon-Tweed...