Equal Night by Graham Fulton
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. Time will become redundant and space meaningless. 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. Trying to balance equally powerful but opposing dyads: the fear and the calm, anger and acceptance, the mundane and the surreal, shadows and light. 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.
‘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
‘He can be hilarious, gut-wrenchingly affecting and deep by turns, turning the relatively small area of his native town and city of Paisley and Glasgow into a universal place, and sharing it with us in his profoundly quiet, powerful voice. The intense humanity of these poems is what you will take with you long after you've read them.’
David Manderson
‘A very strong piece of work … painful, touching, compelling and familiar.’
Andy Croft
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