Glitches of Mortality

Pindrop Press, 2018
110pages, £10
ISBN 978-1-9993599-0-6

Graham Fulton takes ordinary, day-to-day occurrences and turns them inside out - like the binned shirts caught by the wind 'dancing up the street like something from The Invisible Man'. Here we find 'a mad wee granny' dancing to drums and bagpipes on a busy shopping street, a Susan Boyle lookalike stewardess in an imagined plane crash, a car alarm that won't stop, and the poet trying to beat the lights at ten in the morning - 'GO GO GO GO' - which somehow feels like an analogy for the whole of life, or for our impending mortality. These poems are by turns startling, audacious, hilarious and deeply moving.

What Spielberg does for cinema, Graham Fulton echoes in poetry. Humanity on an extensive stage abbreviated by a Scottish diagnosis, Graham's writing is capable of intoxicating the humdrum in a universal language'.

Stephen Watt

Through these quirky, pointed, blackly humorous poems wanders the unheroic figure of the middle-aged poet. His turf is the classic Fulton landscape of buses and car alarms and lost souls. Fulton's poems may be sad, joyful, poignant; they can also be grotesque delights. Mortality presses in - it's the watch that ticks through the collection - but the condition of middle-age can't stop this poet. He's a bard of the banal apocalypse, interested, as always, in the alienations and absurdities of being'.

Gerrie Fellows

Fulton is a remarkable maker of phrases, images and observations. His beleaguered, resilient home town is a world small and gigantic, real and surreal. In a collection with many deaths to mourn, these outstanding new poems are hilarious, heart-breaking and humane. Perhaps this prolific poet's most moving publication so far, this absolute belter of a book does leave messages. And they are unforgettable'.

Donny O'Rourke

Try imitating a Fulton poem and you'll soon find that though ostensibly unworked, they operate within very narrow limits set by extraordinary discipline. Cliche sits side by side with surprising, original formulations, apparently casual recounting is in fact the expert capturing of a unique sensibility.'.

Alan Dent, MQB

Fulton's poetry alludes to the shifting landscapes of his hometown and the erasure of traditional working-class culture without moralizing, and also succeeds in defamiliarizing his local area to the extent that it becomes a different planet with alien(ated) residents. Glitches of Mortality will appeal to new readers as well as those already acquainted with Fulton's distinct, thoughtful and hilarious brand of verse.'

Will Burns, The Bottle Imp