Kirjahaku

Introduced by Jackie Kay, this selection of poems include the famous Strawberries and One Cigarette and four from Morgan's autobiographical sequence, Love and a Life - love in all its aspects.

“I try to write something every day even though I am not writing poetry, just to get myself in touch with language.”—Edwin Morgan Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) is one of the giants of modern literature. Scotland’s national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the playful to the profound. Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language presents previously uncollected prose – journalism, book and theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio scripts, forewords and afterwords – all carefully moulded to the needs of differing audiences. Morgan’s writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find surprises and delights in this new collection.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanzas - together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

To catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

This collection contains most of the work from Selected Poems from 1985, together with later material, such as the complete sequence of Sonnets from Scotland, and Planet Wave, a suite of ten poems covering the history of the earth from the Big Bang to the time of Copernicus.

This reprint of Morgan's popular and well-respected 1952 modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic captures a taut expression of the poem's themes of danger, voyaging, displacement, loyalty, and loss. Morgan provides a fluid, modern voice from this medieval masterwork while retaining a clear authenticity, making it highly accessible to the contemporary reader.

Edwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind to expatiate on a wide range of subjects, social, psychological, philosophical. Some of the poems have been set to music, both jazz and classical. In many ways it is a book of voices and observation, a book of accessible storytelling.

Edwin Morgan is best remembered as Scotland’s foremost national poet, a bold, lyric voice who shaped conversations around queerness, politics and post-war life. But Morgan was also a restless experimenter working far beyond traditional verse. This book brings together, for the first time, the full range of his visual and sound poetry – from vibrant poster poems and surrealist collages to concrete poetry, cut-ups and poem-sculptures. It reveals Morgan as a major figure in twentieth-century multimedia art, linking language, image and sound in surprising and timely ways. Attuned to questions of identity, ecology and empire, Morgan’s work remains as urgent and inventive as ever – a celebration of poetic form at its most expansive and alive.