Reclaimed Land

The Grimsay Press, 2013
121 pages, £9
ISBN 978-1-84530-138-5

An epic sequence of prose poems, accompanied by black and white photographs, about growing up in Paisley in Scotland in the 1960s against a backdrop of worldwide change and upheaval, moon landings and giant musical leaps. It’s an attempt to reclaim and preserve, using the direct and unaffected voice of a child, the sights, sounds, smells, energy, heat, cold, happiness, sadness, faces, people and childlike culture of a long gone time.

"A lovingly crafted evocation of one man’s childhood. Fulton’s experience is clear in the strong, tight structure which avoids any excess or over-sentimentality. Reclaimed Land is typical of Fulton’s work in that he takes everyday ‘normal’ life, and shows how it is poetic".

Northwords Now

"The effect is not so much like looking into Eduard Paolozzi’s studio, at mass-production detritus preserved as art-material, and more like a glimpse into a ‘rich case history’, fin-de-siècle Vienna transposed to post-bellum Paisley, Sigmund Freud to RD Laing. The text is surrounded by uncaptioned photographs, which add a certain Sebaldian shimmer. Fulton is unmistakably a poet … he’s after the Ray Bradbury trick of inducing an air of cognitive estrangement that makes one nostalgic for a time not yet come".

Brian Morton, Scottish Review of Books