Gael Turnbull: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Gael Turnbull (1928 - July 2, 2004) was a Scottish poet who was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival.

Turnbull was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the North of England and in Canada. He studied Natural Science at Cambridge University and graduated in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951.

In 1957, Turnbull started Migrant Press, one of the first British-run presses to focus on poets in the modernist tradition. His work was featured in the groundbreaking Revival anthology (1969). His own books include A Gathering of Poems 1950-1980 (1983) and Rattle of Scree: Poems (1997). He was also published in the anthologies The New British Poetry (1988), (1999) and Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001)

He returned to Edinburgh in the early 1990s. In this city, he worked on what he termed kinetic poems; texts for instalation in which the movement of the reader and/or of the text became part of the reading experience. He died on a visit to Herefordshire of a sudden brain haemorrhage.