Equal Night

Salmon Poetry, 2017
60 pages, £7
ISBN 978-1-910669-88-4

Death is the great taboo. We don’t like to talk about it or think about it. We try to hide from the brutal fact that someday we’re going to come to an end. Everything suddenly stops.Equal Night is a sequence of poems that chooses to face the reality of dying head on. It’s about someone experiencing the death of a loved one, moving through the events before, during and after. It’s a personal journey among billions of others, but one that becomes ultimately universal as it embraces each of us tangled within the bewildering condition of being alive.

What is perhaps most remarkable about these poems is not so much the acute, poignant and clearly loving attitude the poet has towards his mother and her demise, but rather his ability to see things analytically, to show us how our bodies are processed in such a clinical and cynical way ... striking and memorable'.

Richie McCaffery, The Bottle Imp

A remarkable sequence of poems ... unflinching honesty... unsettling and moving. By looking death in the eye and not blinking, the work of this poet enriches life'

Kenny Taylor, Northwords Now

Nobody has written about this life's end in this way before, and no-one ever will, with the final moment of picking up a stray scarf moving beyond relevance, beyond poetry'

David Manderson, Laldy! magazine

His myriad sometimes quirky tabulation of objects fashions and local people in action has made Graham Fulton's poetry a distinct personal telling of urban culture in the west of Scotland. Now this previously sometimes detached, sometimes sardonic voice has recorded a journey through the experience of seeing the onset of terminal illness, hospitalisation and death of a mother. I think the cumulative effect is extraordinary, the most convincing, honest, matter of fact and unsettling account of the nitty-gritty of "going through the daily motions" of confronting death and the estrangement of close family bereavement that I have read, certainly in my own culture. Graham Fulton's poetry sequence carries the unmistakeable truth of genuine necessary art'

Tom Leonard

A very strong piece of work ... painful, touching, compelling and familiar'

Andy Croft