The big velodrome in the sky—racing around trying to explore what’s reality what’s life what’s running away what’s death what we  do to capture beauty or try to understand or survive or do more than just survive or go insane with tender love and speed and space and drunkenness mad cruel and beautiful randomness and funniness and it’s like the demented dance people do when the plague’s in town and you’ve got a day maybe to live and make sense of it all.

 

Graham Fulton is a poet and publisher based in Paisley. He formed the Itinerant Poets with Jim Ferguson, Ronald McNeil and Bobby Christie and they produced Tower of Babble in 1987. He is widely published in magazines, anthologies, online journals and newspapers and has had 24 full-length collections published by many different publishers including Polygon, Penniless Press, Smokestack Books, Red Squirrel Press and Salmon Poetry, the most recent being The Jackdaw Files (Seahorse Publications, 2022), Dreams of Scottish Youth Volume One and Two (Published in Silence Press, 2022) and The Testes of Lenin (Pindrop Press, 2022). He used to play drums and run marathons. His work has been translated into several languages and his second non-poetry book The Renfrewshire Victoria Crosses will be published in 2023.

 

Praise for graham fulton’s writing

 

from reviews of Replacement Service: Collected Bus Poems

‘Fulton’s sensibility is democratic, egalitarian, friendly, ill-at-ease with pomposity and power. He has a down-beat approach, reminiscent here of Ferlinghetti and in its modest sympathy and unfussy love of life, of Prévert. This is a delightful collection. Read it on the bus.’

 

—Alan Dent, MQB

 

from reviews of Something Good Will Always Happen

‘Fulton is known for his lyrical tenderness and this quality does come to the surface in the collection, but much of the work here is full of fury and horror. These are poems about where we are and what we are: beautiful, terrifying, fleeting.’

 

—David Manderson, Laldy! Magazine

 

from reviews of Speed of Dark

‘Every country needs their Graham Fulton. He’s a prolific, angry, humane, funny, accessible poet.’

 

—John Glenday, Northwords Now

 

from reviews of The Zombie Poem

‘A delight to read...a brilliant example of how much one can fit into a relatively small space without being obscure, dense or jarring. The theme is tackled delicately, with intelligence and subtle black humour...a masterclass in not overburdening the poetry with its subject. All this, and it’s fun.’

 

 

—Ambit

 

 

from reviews of Circulation

‘Fulton manages to not look away and sees with compassion and humour the inarticulate comedy and tragedy of the lives of people without social, cultural or financial capital. He also takes it to another level with an incredible free-wheeling imaginative freedom, a savouring of the sounds and rhythms of the West Coast Scottish urban vernacular and a real mastery of voice.’

 

—Morag Smith, Glasgow Review of Books

 

from reviews of Brian Wilson in Swansea Bus Station

‘Is he a prankster, this Graham Fulton fellow? Yes he is, but a Bertrand Russell prankster. He draws you in with his merry wit and slays you with two lines or less. He’s gaining a wider readership and it’s about time. God only knows we need his voice.’

 

—Sandra Hunter, author of Losing Touch

 

from reviews of Equal Night

‘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

from reviews of One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich

‘He writes and publishes a lot, yet as a poet he never does anything wrong...for the title of his next book I would like to suggest Fulton Misses Nothing.’

 

—Sally Evans, Northwords Now

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