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.