New Selected Poems

Reviews / Votes

Glasgow's poet laureate is also Europe's most important living poet.Edwin Morgan, at 80, has assimilated cultures and techniques from abroad since the 1950s in order to inform and entertain his Scottish readers.Too often his self-effacing manner has seen him marginalised.It is only when one speaks with fellow admirers as far apart as Barcelona, Berlin, and Dublin that one begins to glimpse at his international appeal and reputation.

New Selected includes most of the work in the 1985 Selected.Notable additions are poems from Sweeping Out The Dark and the wonderful '10 poem suite', Planet Wave, set to jazz by saxophonist Tommy Smith.

Rereading familiar poems evokes pleasure similar to reconnecting with a new love's letters. Strawberries, an epiphany of sharing written in the 1960s, finds resonance in the 'morning breaking on dark fields' that leads into 'A Scottish Japanese Print', one of the 1984 Sonnets From Scotland. A gem among treasures.This volume includes that complete sequence.Random Quote: The World. 'Sometimes it swells like the echo of a passion / Dying with paens, not sighs.Who knows the weight and list of its rebellions?' New Selected Poems

"His poetic palette is prodigiously varied and vivid and this collection spans the best

of an incisive and humane talent."



- Colin Cardwell, Scotland on Sunday, 30/4/2000.



"informed, affectionate and inclusive - [Morgan] seizes on popular culture as a manifestation

of the greater underlying potential we all share."



- Tom Pow, New Statesman Scotland, 15/5/2000. Scotland On Sunday

Sunday 30th April 2000

Page SEVEN 12



For queen and country



NEW SELECTED POEMS

by Edwin Morgan

Carcanet, GBP7.95

Review by Colin Cardwell

EDWIN Morgan, Glasgow's poet laureate and recent winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry,

celebrated his 80th birthday last week.Radio Scotland planned to mark the event with a series

of readings which will include a Morgan poem on sperm donation that emphatically highlights the

octogenarian's pawky humour and total lack of pomposity: 'Ah thocht Glasgow was that macho/But

here we're doon tae wir last batch o/Sperm, the bank's near empty, Gode,/Ur therr nae real men to

loosen their load?' It will be interesting to see what Her Majesty makes of that one.

It is typical of the joyous demotic that breathes urgency and vitality into Morgan's poems about

Scotland, and particularly Glasgow.But combined with an obvious and deep affection for the city

of his birth, Morgan's free-hearted internationalism and insouciant eclecticism are appropriately

represented in this new collection, spanning works from 1952 to 1994.

Morgan is a poetic quidnunc whose roving eye lights on a cascade of variform subjects and objects:

a cigarette; a dosser dying in the street; jack London in Heaven; Rules for Dwarf Throwing - all

handled with consummate craftsmanship and rigour but splendidly accessible and free from

self-conscious artifice.

Glasgow Sonnets, from 1973, underscores the hawk eye for detail, the grit combined with

compassion that we associate with Morgan the urban poet: "A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the

close./Late shadows lengthen slowly, slogans fade./The YY PARTICK TOI grins from its shade like

the last strains of some lost libera nos a malo."

A decade later, in Sonnets from Scotland he still displays a sure ability to delineate a scene;

evoke a sense of time and place: 'Infinitely variable water/let seals bob in your silk or loll on

Mull/where the lazy fringes rustle; let hull and screw slew you round, blind heavy daughter

feeling for shores".

While Canedolia underscores his capacity for sheer intellectual delight, this time playing with

the exuberant nonsense of Scottish place names: "what do you do? we foindle and fungle, we

bonkle and meigle and maxpoffle. we scotstarvit, armit, wormit and even whifflet."

Beyond our spatial and temporal borders, Planet Wave, set to music by jazz saxophonist Tommy

Smith pans from the Big Bang: 'Don't ask me and don't tell me. I was there.It was a bang and it

was big" to Copernicus: "I looked from the roof till it dark and starry, I and knew my travels

were just beginning; the Magellanic Clouds/ wait for those who have climbed Magellan's shrouds.

" - a characteristically inventive, whimsical series of dioramas.

Morgan at 80 - the English professor and the man at the Gorbals bus stop - remains an impressive

poetic presence on the national and international stage.With a combination of supreme

craftsmanship, generosity of spirit and intellectual glee he has been one of the principal forces

to have impelled Scottish poetry out of the kailyard and, crucially, inspired an exciting

generation that includes Kathleen Jamie, WN Herbert and Don Paterson - a generation whose

Scottishness ranges, says Morgan, "from the rabid to the near-invisible."

Plangent, piquant, compassionate, mordant, tender - his poetic palette is prodigiously varied

and vivid and this collection spans the best of an incisive and humane talent.