Glitches of Mortality
by Graham Fulton
£10 (pub. 2018)

Graham Fulton takes ordinary, day-to-day occurrences and turns them inside out – like the binned shirts caught by the wind ‘dancing up the street like something from The Invisible Man’. Here we find ‘a mad wee granny’ dancing to drums and bagpipes on a busy shopping street, a Susan Boyle lookalike stewardess in an imagined plane crash, a car alarm that won’t stop, and the poet trying to beat the lights at ten in the morning – ‘GO GO GO GO’ – which somehow feels like an analogy for the whole of life, or for our impending mortality. These poems are by turn startling, audacious, hilarious and deeply moving.

Praise for Glitches of Mortality:

“What Spielberg does for cinema, Graham Fulton echoes in poetry. Humanity on an extensive stage abbreviated by a Scottish diagnosis, Graham’s writing is capable of intoxicating the humdrum in a universal language.”

Stephen Watt

“Through these quirky, pointed, blackly humorous poems wanders the unheroic figure of the middle-aged poet. His turf is the classic Fulton landscape of buses and car alarms and lost souls. Fulton’s poems may be sad, joyful, poignant; they can also be grotesque delights. Mortality presses in – it’s the watch that ticks through the collection – but the condition of middle-age can’t stop this poet. He’s a bard of the banal apocalypse, interested, as always, in the alienations and absurdities of being.”

Gerrie Fellows

“Fulton is a remarkable maker of phrases, images and observations. His belea- guered, resilient home town is a world small and gigantic, real and surreal. In a collection with many deaths to mourn, these outstanding new poems are hi- larious, heart-breaking and humane. Perhaps this prolific poet’s most moving publication so far, this absolute belter of a book does leave messages. And they are unforgettable.”

Donnie O'Rourke

The Egg Bearer

to everyone’s delight
a mad wee granny
wearing clothes which come
from the 60s
and wires coming out of her ears
is standing
right in front
of the Clanedonia drum and bagpipe
street entertainment ensemble
as they pound out some
incomprehensible tune on Argyle Street
and thump
and beat
and take us back
to some kind of hunter-
gatherer post-ice age Shangri-La
or possibly a much later Robert-the-Brucey
let’s get stuck into these English bastards-
style nostalgia
and is doing
a demented wee dance
as she receives instructions
from Planet Mentalist
with jerky movements
and
arthritic waggling
of her subversive hips
for about three minutes
as people film her on their phones
until it’s all over
and she shimmies right up
to a wee boy in his pram
and gives him a Cadbury’s Creme Egg

(from Glitches of Mortality)