Turner

David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ is a long narrative poem written in response to J.M.W. Turner’s celebrated painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying. Dabydeen’s poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner’s painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man’s unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner’s painting. ‘Turner’ was first published in 1994. In addition to ‘Turner’, this collection includes selections from two earlier books: Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey (1988).