Selected Poems

by Edwin Morgan

Book by Morgan, Edwin

Genres: Poetry, Scotland

139 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1985

About the author

Edwin George Morgan OBE was a Scottish poet and translator who is associated with the Scottish literary renaissance. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Scottish national poet: The Scots Makar.

Reviews

[David Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

One problem with participating in Reading Challenges, or with publicly sharing your #2020Reads is that you can start to believe the picture you're painting. This picture will probably portray you as the great explorer and this can be pleasing if you're vain enough (I'm vain enough). The picture will also be a lie. In presenting you as an explorer it will most likely erase all activity that complicates your trajectory to the point of incoherence. Stray poems, essays, comic strips - these will not necessarily trouble the picture you find yourself painting, and this absence should trouble you.

I can honestly say that I've read read this short collection of Edwin Morgan's poems from cover to cover, but if I had only read half that much its absence from the story I'm telling myself about what I've read this year would still be farcical.

Thankfully, the poems themselves serve as a counterweight to this sort of deceitful, ill-directed flattery. It would be impossible to make your way through this book and to feel that you had in any way completed it; with the wet concrete poems, it is sometimes hard to know whether you've even started. Elsewhere, Morgan allows himself to enjoy pure sound and science-fantasy, making it hard for the honest reader to pretend they've got a sense of his limits. The great thing about reading his poems in volume - if not necessarily in a *collected* volume like this one - is that all of these elements are inextricably linked to the world in which they were produced. From grim encounters on Glasgow Green to moments of tenderness in front of the TV by way of dubious offers of housing, Morgan's poetry is clearly the poetry of a life, written from the scattered positions it will most likely be read in.

Like your reading, it need not always fit together as part of a comprehensible story in order to feel whole.

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Morgan is remarkable for the variousness--reportage poems; concrete poems; process-driven or almost procedural poems, on Surrealist, Oulipean and Czech models; reflections on love, war and collectivity (national, tacitly that of sexual orientation and social in broad senses) ... the variousness and consistent excellence of his writing, and for the lack of ego, unusual in a poet, that makes this possible. His leftwing sensibility, not affiliated to party or perhaps to political philosophy, is another underpinning. I was especially interested this rereading in the 1962-7 period, comprising the Glasgow to Saturm collection, and the portrayal of the city's collectivism, compromises, hopes and squalor in the relatively plain-spoken sonnets--where Morgan really hits a rich vein of form. The filiations are clear in this collection to the more exuberantly verbose, New Romantic mode of the poet's debut.

[Bieiris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Venga, para animaros a leer a este estupendísimo poeta aquí van unos versos, los primeros que leí suyos hace un lustro:

STRAWBERRIES

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Como no sólo de amor vive el hombre, en esta pequeña colección encontraréis poemas humorísticos que os harán soltar unas sonoras carcajadas, véanse "Siesta of a Hungarian Snake", que más bien parece un chiste privado para los eternos aprendices de esta lengua infernal, aunque reconozco que yo me río con cualquier tontuna; y sobre todo, "The Mummy". Pocas veces he leído un poema tan desternillante. Una pequeña y genial muestra:

-M' n'm 'z 'zym'ndias, kng'v kngz!

-Yes, yes. Well, Shelley is dead now.
He was not embalmed. He will not write
about Your Majesty again.

Demasié. No os lo perdáis por nada del mundo.

[Roz Baynham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection was my first introduction to Morgan, aged 16, at school in a sprawling comprehensive in Fife. To say I was starved of an awareness of Scottish literature isn't quite fair, but this was my first taste of modern Scottish poetry. Morgan became the voice of Scotland, for me, and the voice of a man endowed with the ability to write compassionate, moving and often very funny poems about my country and which spoke to me, even at 16.

He remains thus so: his work is truly modern, a forward-thinker, often a lone voice extolling beauty in the grim darkness where others would ignore it. He moves between looking to the future for Scotland, exposing his contemporary problems in Glasgow, and writing touching, heart-warming love poems, my favourite of which is One Cigarette, which follows a typical Morganian process of 'making the ordinary extra-ordinary', giving the rising, dissipating smoke of his lover's last cigarette the metaphorical weight of their love. The first line remains my favourite line of all the poetry I have ever studied and read:

No smoke without you, my fire.

For me, this is simply stunning, a declaration of want, need and desire, wrapped up so neatly, with Morgan's wry smile in the background.