Replacement Service: Collected Bus Poems

Seahorse Publications, 2021
72 pages, £10
ISBN 978-1-9162145-6-9

Graham Fulton doesn't drive a car and never will. This means that he spends quite a bit of time travelling on buses, trains, occasionally planes; an endless source of inspiration. The nature of existence up close in all its beguiling and baffling forms. Buses have proved the most fertile ground, and over the years many poems set on buses or at bus stops or in bus stations have appeared in his collections. These poems, spanning almost four decades of writing from past collections and collections still to come, have now been gathered for the first time under one vibrating roof. A funny, touching, surreal journey into the ordinary extraordinary situations of everyday humans.

I've never met Graham Fulton because surely I'd remember being in the presence of greatness. Those poems take me to moments in my life with the sharpness of focus on time and place and atmospheres and emotion and philosophy that only a genius is capable of. Some are moments I'm embarrassed to remember, others are moments of seeing the greatness in life in fleeting everyday events. Charles Bukowski is a master at writing in a similar fashion about the underclasses but Fulton's work is better by miles. Not a wasted word and each phrase is carefully balanced as a swaying drunk on a bus. Here is a poet at the height of his powers (although hopefully he has higher to go). Fulton should be widely celebrated in his home country of Scotland. This is by far the most dazzling, profound and unpretentious poetry I've ever read. And just like a boxer who knows a world class boxer when he sees one, I have seen one of Scotland's world class poets. Someone needs to sit up and take notice of just how good Fulton is at digging diamonds out of the dust of everyday futility. Hats off to the man's talent.'

Des Dillon, writer