Sweeping Out the Dark

With "Sweeping out the Dark" Carcanet celebrates 21 years of publishing Edwin Morgan's poems, prose and translations. Morgan's work, with its Scottish and European perspectives, is at once sophisticated and popular. He brings the lessons of Continental and Anglo-American Modernism together in a unique aesthetic; his work and example - as poet, essayist, translator - have proven serviceable for writers in Scotland and throughout the English-speaking world. The work in this volume, his first since the "Collected Poems" (1990) which marked his 70th birthday, shows him to be as inventive and engaging as ever. The political changes of recent years, urban violence, squalor and community, an America of the (troubled) mind, all find a place in a book which gives news of where we are, where we are going. The translations - of Claudian, of Michelangelo and Leopardi and Montale, of Pushkin to Blok and Mayakovsky, of Jozsef, of Aigi - enhance this book.