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Julian Turner makes an exemplary debut with a collection in which the poems are thoughtfully crafted and each comes with its own distinct feel to it. He is well attuned to current trends, favouring a slightly crumpled formality and an off-the-peg erudition. But this manner is slightly deceptive and masks a sense of the mysterious and lyrical that emerges fully in 'The Seal People', the last poem of the book. It not by accident, one suspects, that Crossing the Outskirts starts out in the Home Counties and ends in the Western Isles. The mixture of the mundane and the transcendent gives Turner's poems their impetus and sets them on their often slightly skewed trajectories. Like the conjuror-magician of 'Hoc Est Corpus', he is skilled at finding the 'tropes of magic hidden in the raw material we call the world'. The poems are never quite what they seem at first: the routines are purposeful, deftly timed, and the endings they produce prove quite unpredictable.