Knights of the Lower Floors

Polygon, 1994
91 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0-7486-6154-9

Fulton's second full length collection exhibits a poetry which is sharply observant and spikily mature. Blackly humorous, ferocious and unsettling, Fulton jumps from everyday Transylvanian Paisley to Paris and Berlin, passing Kirk Douglas, Oscar Wilde and Elvis Presley on the way. Altogether, an edgy and exuberant collection.

"Graham Fulton has a highly original talent, celebrating the bizarre detritus of our times without losing the human touch. His vivid jagged poetry catches the acrid tang of reality with impressive force".

Edwin Morgan

"Another batch of cool and sexy terse verse which has lost none of its spiky jagged pop appeal".

Eddie Torrance, Rebel Inc

Cream of Scottish Youth

From Knights Of The Lower Floors

rolled

trousers to knees and
danced a weird waltz.

Chucked bangers at club-feet,
snow at girls' faces,
crisp bags full of frogspawn slop.

Sat among rocks, wore Harlequin socks,
rabbit ear collars and baratheas, spat
on the heads of waggy yap dogs
allowed to run free by owners.
Rolled

jumper sleeves to elbows
and pretended to be Thalidomide.
Smoked
singles
bought from ice-cream vans,
scuffed mushy leaves with best shoes, kicked
puddle-twigs at the dumb sun as the wind
swiped through branches, scurried
among big shadows.
Tumbled,

yelling, from dizzy swish roundabouts,
pelted the swans in the dam with cans,
tore the pages from brainyboy's books
then tipped his schoolbag upside down,
lit fires just for the hell of it, splashed
scruffy steam gold against the oaks
that had seen it all before.

Ate banana and marmite rolls
as gloom curdled in the cloakroom.
Looked at photos of whopper breasts,
studied photos of open legs,
fell over each other to sniff

the future.
Fumbled
in panties at puberty parties,
swallowed Pale Ale, Newcastle Brown,
Pernod and Old Tawny Eldo cocktails.
Gathered at night to sit on walls
or topple sun-dials onto grass.
Made scratchy marks on sheds and lamp-posts,
squirted stinking, chemist perfumes
onto clothes of teeth-brace boys,
spluttered over thick Panatellas,
dropped lit matches into postboxes.
Said the words 'fanny', 'gobble' and 'spunk',
spooned in shagalley toothpaste dark,
fell over each other to reach

the sex.
Grew

hair long, got it chopped off,
did everything wrong, everything
right,
and skated,
laughing
into the void, fell over
each other to ask

the time.
Rolled

trousers to knees and
danced a daft can-can.
Rolled back to ankles, hobbled
for home, the whipped

cream of Scotland's Dream.

"Angry, funny, affecting, accessible".

The Scotsman

"Fulton's work is impressive because he finds new ways of looking at a world we all recognise … he has reshaped it to create a vibrant literary art. And its vibrancy comes from the humanity with which the lines and their characters are invested".

West Coast Magazine

"Fulton has developed an original poetic personality that's aggressively his own … having been to the same America as Edwin Morgan, Fulton has brought back a scarier poetics. He is less a dream than a nightmare state".

Donny O'Rourke, Dream State