While Breath Persist

Gael Turnbull's first book publication was in 1954 with the Contact Press in Toronto in Trio, a volume featuring the first poems of Phyllis Webb, Turnbull, and Eli Mandel. The next year, while living in Iroquois Falls, Ontario, he published, with Jean Beaupré translations from the French of Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau, Roland Giguère, Giles Hénault and Paul Marie Lapointe.

Influenced by Raymond Souster and the Contact Press movement and by Cid Corman and the Black Mountain poets in the States, he returned to England where in 1957 he founded Migrant Press, one of the pioneer small presses for modern poetry in Britain.

Kenneth Cox writing in the Australian magazine Scripsi said of Gael Turnbull's longer poems (many of which are collected here): `Technically these poems are among the most original written in English during the past two decades.'

Turnbull wrote a brief but significant autobiographical comment for a small pamphlet of poems prepared to accompany a reading he gave in 1962 at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto for the Contact Press (fifth) Readings Series: `My father's family are hereditary freemen of Berwick-on-Tweed, so that I suppose I am a ``borderer'' ... but the Borders for me are not just those between England and Scotland, but between those countries and Canada and the United States as well ...'.