Turner

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.