Books by Graham Fulton

2016 and 2017. Years in which the world seemed to settle ever deeper into a spiral of collective craziness and waste. Years of casually barbaric war, desperate refugees, 'Breaking News' terror attacks, man-made tragedy, corporate indifference and the grotesque election of a vengeful, narcissistic, imbecile president by a supposedly intelligent nation. Dystopia becoming commonplace. These poems are a surgery of the human condition, an exploration of the helplessness and uneasiness of being alive in these machine-dependent times of selfishness and superficiality. Edgy, skeletal poems juxtaposed with poems of clear lyricism. Poems of universal turmoil and personal loss. An offering of rhythms and words trying to make themselves understood against a deafening backdrop of inevitability, foreboding for the future. Or, possibly, there really is nothing out there to fear, and something good will always happen.

It's a world of madness, but we have to keep going. We have to keep taking whatever this life throws at us, and somehow arrive at the end happily intact. Graham Fulton's collection, using new poems, and poems selected from two previously published pamphlets, stumbles and careers through a geography of absurdity and tenderness, defeat and hope, obsession and paranoia. A real breathing world populated with drunks, Daleks and devil dogs; Proust-loving football supporters and road rage maniacs. A pre-apocalyptic wasteland of glittering fragments that come together to make completely no sense. All we can do is Continue.