NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Tim Turnbull has been a regular participant in slam competitions, and was the winner of the inaugural Edinburgh Book Festival Slam Competition in 2002. Poetry for performance is often best heard and listened to, where immediacy enhances the work, but Turnbull's poetry is immensely readable.

WHAT WAS THAT?, is a collection of fifteen poems by Turnbull, published by Donut Press. We encounter a variety of dialects, tones and language which blend to create a lively and diverse group of poems. This variety, conversely, helps contribute to a number of themes which run through them.

Turnbull's poetry is the place of extremes and of challenges for art. Poems of geography, of lists and collective nouns mingle in humorous, and sometimes sinister, undertones, taking the reader on journeys of adventure, revelation and surprise. Turnbull is a deft storyteller with a cinematographic eye, continually offering a unique view. We eavesdrop on a world of many voices, populated by the most extraordinary, everyday people, characterised by the strength of these voices.

A prominent theme combines the everyday world and the world of art. This collection almost seems like a book of reviews on art, in poetic form, using real-life characterisation. Questions for high art and culture in everyday contexts, which often represent opposites, are skilfully gathered in Turnbull's poetry. These perceived conflicts are a vehicle in which to approach the world of art, with her vanities and fashions, using earthy language as commentary upon it. No room here for the clichéd, high-brow language of art reception. In Turnbull's poetry, culture and art are linked to the people. The volume's title, WHAT WAS THAT? is a question often asked of art and posed by art, the telling of which marks success and the artist's reception in the art world. For Turnbull, reputations are made and lost, not by authorities on art, but by people like the discerning thieves in the first poem of the collection, THE TOERAG SITUATIONISTS, who leave behind the music of Elton John in,

	our lass's Astra GTi

	mystified the police

	and left behind the Bee Gees.

The re-view of art criticism and art critics in the poem, IN THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY AFTER THE PRIVATE VIEW, follows this theme. The first line is written phonetically, humorously reinforcing the voice of dialect,

	Two faaz'n years of culchah, Mickey Nails
	complains and snorts into his beer

	avant-gardists' aspirations

	The selfharmer stroke
	performance artists's photographs of cuts
	looked superficial and did not impress us

	yuppies ...
	glide like ghosts

	scum and arty hangers-on

	Oh Yeah, two thousand years of culture

Turnbull's poetry understands the importance of contexts, most eloquently displayed in the poem, "9/11", where a direct voice tells us,

	The first I hear of it is in the butcher's shop

	I scuff the sawdust, draw on the sticky scent

	we're where we started from

Names and name-dropping are prevalent in the poetry. The reader might recognise names as eclectic as Patience Strong, Yeats, Ma Broon and Tennyson, but the numerous references to other named characters might drive you, as it did me, off to the reference books. Objects such as beers, Bacardis and cars are also found to be in abundance. In the poem, ARCHIE RICE WITH EVERYTHING, we meet the seedier side of humour in the character of Archie Rice. The poet tells us in a fine juxtaposition of words that the,

	fat comedian's looking rather smug

	... just done Tony Blair
	and wanking, mobile phones and Class B drugs

The world is like a ride in an amusement park and when you choose to go on it you think it's real, because that's how powerful our minds are.

	... a horse
	on a piano that makes you laugh until you
	gasp for air and, lastly, hear
	the music. It's "The Cuckoo Waltz".