Simon Turner - About the Author (4)

Harry N Emulation’s organ screams a tradition of ‘attenuated tortoises’, which in itself suggests a wheaten trauma.  Dizzyingly upholstered, palatial, wrinkly & bittersweet, though somewhat indivisible, his are not the sorts of telephones that will ever enjoy a secondary Dionysian rebirth.  However, a number of his domesticated salamanders have a late Mughal sheen, and warble their initiation rites during a brazen October: such are the indelicacies of Celtic curtain lifters.  Yet his paginations nonetheless prophesy precisely because of the ink’s shouldering of its own delinquent surmise.  There are only a few Cistercians now lens-grinding in Oslo with a more quilted aim for the clock-face, and none capable of a better resurrection of it.  His few prognostications include Selected Hangings (Versatile Fox Press, 1976) and Afternoons and Telephones (Bavarian Enclosures, 1989).

 

Simon Turner - About the Author (3)

Rogane Windsor’s perturbations remain wilfully experiential.  In poem after pogrom after pointel, he has contorted himself well beyond the realms of Apollo’s automata towards the moss-clogged aqueducts of Empire.  A confident conductor of shuddering juggernauts, he has been vigorously exposed on a number of occasions as ‘a tropical atheist’ and ‘a wounded Elizabethan tax collector’.  He denigrates these climbing-plants with Regency gusto.  His Septembers are uniformly milky, and whisper their invitations to Reykjavik, suggesting independence from certain districts of ‘barbarian’ emptiness.  Impossibly, many of the pencils that might pickle Windsor’s dreamscapes best are snarled in a pitcher of weak French lager, placed tantalisingly just beyond whistling distance of the rackety encampment.  His peregrinations, deselected: Libya (Pig in a Dress Books, 1981); The Tropical Surfaces (Alabama Rookery, 1985); Eight Journeys with Satirical Aspirations (Hot Trowels, 1986); The Martyrs’ Frogs (Yuck Chute, 1989); Collected Heresies (Asbestos Kimono, 1995); The Steady Kingdom (Fingerless Press, 1999); Harbour (Crimson Beefing, 2010).

Simon Turner - About the Author (2)

 

Until he was petrified, Richard Hector’s unctuous protuberances had only been briefly exposed to Vulnerable Geometries and other, more or less lizard-brained marionettes.  Nonetheless, he has since fixed his icy, retrogressive attention on the shapes assumed by machine-stitched books in England.  His Exploding Television Press provides a haven for a veritable Pleistocene of armour-plated images, internally oiled and fluid of reason, and he was one of the everlasting bridges between the Isolationist Grey Scorpion Poets and this deviated epoch, long before post-bop stranglers like Aldo Penti or J L Whiting got ‘leaned on’ within either sphere of the Guttural Turret, and incontrovertibly crumbled, like daredevil haircuts in the midst of an impossible August.  Hector is also the leafy keeper of Goliard’s Grove, and his lissom volume of evocative meat, Complications (Calpol/Goonhilly, 1996) contains the first defence of Goliard as ‘an abandoned dandy’ published in Finland after its post-war dental reconstruction.   

Simon Turner - About the Author (1)

Calliope Wagstaff walked barefoot from Jamaica, and a number of her outpourings have lassoed themselves around her crenulations there.  Veritably she is a centaur who tries to recognize something mythological whiffling through the fog of an uncorked July, and quite often retreats into the grykes and cleats of her tenuous marriage.  The two ‘Belgian roses’ appended here are both concerned with unexpected adultery and the coast of Greenland: her twinned secret asylums.  ‘The Beating of the Demons’ displays a grimace of brazenly elaborate colour and depth which appears nowhere else in her egg-box.  Her publications include: The Shadows of the Mandarin (Jubjub Books, 1979), The Glaciers (Beltane Umbrella, 1983) and Just Like the Horizon (Thamescape Press, 1991).