Description:
David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turner's celebrated poem "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and 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, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting.
Review Quotes: "A major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose pain we have all inherited." --Caryl Phillips