Edwin Morgan

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.

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.

“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.

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.

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan’s full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.

Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgamesh's quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and 'disappeared' political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester--and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss. Received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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.

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEADThis book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision.MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poems on the modern world and city life. Liz Lochhead writes with an alert and sensitive eye on personal relationships and women's experience of them. The book provides an invaluable introduction to modern Scottish poetry and to the poets who are arguably its greatest practitioners.

Edwin Morgan returns to the stage with an examination of the life of Jesus as a man among men. Jesus is portrayed as a human figure in an inhuman time. A declaration of love from his closest disciple, John, described in his own Gospel as the "Disciple who Jesus loved", comes to the fore in Morgan's efforts to explore the character of the real man.

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.

The first translations I made - from Verlaine, in 1937 - were naive attempts to convey the enthusiasm I felt for the sudden discovery of a foreign poet: Verlaine said something to me in his language which no poet in my own language had ever said before, and I wanted to show, if I could, what this quality was... So began a wonderful addiction - wonderful for Morgan the writer, discovering new resources in each language he mastered; and wonderful for his readers for whom he has opened so many doors. 'Morgan's abilities as a translator are so generous that there is a danger of taking them for granted as he glides from Hungarian to Italian to Russian,' Robert Crawford said in the Scotsman. There is something profligate in the range of Morgan's work as a translator. He does the labour of ten writers because his own work nourishes itself from the poetry of other lands and ages. It is part of the necessary mechanism that Morgan, as a Scot, employs to define his place as a European. Collected Translations includes six decades ofwork. Readers will find here Morgan's celebrated Mayakovsky done into Scots, his Voznesensky, Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the French - Leopardi, Montale, Guillevic, and Michaux; and there are Heine, Lorca, Cernuda, Brecht, Enzensberger and Braga.... and much more.

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.