Collected Poems: (Poetry Pleiade)

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Prologue: Sculpture Dies Irae (1952) Dies Irae Stanzas of the Jeopardy 'What waves have beaten…' A Warning of Waters at Evening The Sleights of Darkness The Sleights of Time Sleight-of-Morals Harrowing Heaven, 1924 From the Anglo-Saxon: The Ruin The Seafarer The Wanderer Riddles: Swallows; Swan; Bookworm; Storm From the Middle English: The Grave The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) The Vision of Cathkin Braes A Courtly Overture Ingram Lake or, Five Acts on the House A Snib for the Nones Verses for a Christmas Card A Song of the Petrel The Cape of Good Hope (1955) The Cape of Good Hope The Whittrick: a Poem in Eight Dialogues (1961; first published as a whole, 1973) from Newspoems (1965-1971) Notice in Hell Notice in Heaven Sick Man Charon's Song Forgetful Duck Möbius's Bed Come In Old Cock Idyll New English Riddles: 1 Advice to a Corkscrew Unpublished Poems by Creeley: 2 Visual soundpoem from Emergent Poems (1967) Plea Dialeck Piece Nightmare Manifesto from Gnomes (1968) Strawberry Fields Forever Archives Astrodome The Computer's Second Christmas Card The Second Life (1968) The Old Man and the Sea The Death of Marilyn Monroe Je ne regrette rien The Domes of St Sophia The White Rhinoceros The Third Day of the Wolf Aberdeen Train The Opening of the Forth Road Bridge To Hugh MacDiarmid To Ian Hamilton Finlay An Addition to the Family Canedolia Starryveldt Message Clear Bees' Nest French Persian Cats Having a Ball Orgy To Joan Eardley Linoleum Chocolate Good Friday The Starlings in George Square King Billy Glasgow Green The Suspect In the Snack-bar Trio Pomander Summer Haiku Siesta of a Hungarian Snake Boats and Places Seven Headlines The Computer's First Christmas Card Opening the Cage The Chaffinch Map of Scotland The Second Life The Sheaf The Unspoken From a City Balcony When you go Strawberries The Witness One Cigarette The Picnic Absence Without It The Welcome O Pioneers! Construction for I. K. Brunel Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly The Tower of Pisa Spacepoem 1: From Laika to Gagarin Chinese Cat Islands In Sobieski's Shield From the Domain of Arnheim For the International Poetry Incarnation What is 'Paradise Lost' really about? The Ages A View of Things from Penguin Modern Poets 15 (1969) The Flowers of Scotland The Horseman's Word (1970) Arabian Nights Magic Horse Clydesdale Newmarket Centaur Eohippus Kelpie Hrimfaxi Zane's Hortobágy Elegy from Instamatic Poems (1972) GLASGOW 5 MARCH 1971 ('With a ragged diamond') GLASGOW 5 MARCH 1971 ('Quickly the magistrate') NICE 5 MARCH 1971 CHICAGO MAY 1971 GERMANY DECEMBER 1970 NIGERIA UNDATED REPORTED OCTOBER 1971 LEATHERHEAD SURREY SEPTEMBER 1971 AVIEMORE INVERNESSSHIRE AUGUST 1971 MOUGINS PROVENCE SEPTEMBER 1971 VENICE APRIL 1971 LONDON JUNE 1970 ROCKALL INVERNESSSHIRE JUNE 1972 ELLINGHAM SUFFOLK JANUARY 1972 LANCASHIRE NOVEMBER 1971 WASHINGTON SEPTEMBER 1971 TRANSLUNAR SPACE MARCH 1972 BANGAON INDIA JULY 1971 GLASGOW OCTOBER 1971 BRADFORD JUNE 1972 CAMPOBASSO ITALY UNDATED REPORTED MARCH 1971 LONDON NOVEMBER 1971 ('At the Festival of Islam') GLASGOW NOVEMBER 1971 ('It is a fine thronged…') GLASGOW NOVEMBER 1971 ('The "speckled pipe" of the MacCrimmons') MILAN UNDATED REPORTED OCTOBER 1971 From Glasgow to Saturn (1973) Columba's Song Floating off to Timor In Glasgow Kierkegaard's Song Tropic Shantyman Oban Girl The Woman The Apple's Song Drift Fado After the Party At the Television Set From the North The Milk-cart Estranged For Bonfires i-iii Blue Toboggans Song of the Child Lord Jim's Ghost's Tiger Poem Flakes Hyena The Loch Ness Monster's Song The Mill London: I St James's Park II Soho III The Post Office Tower Interferences: a sequence of 9 poems Che The Fifth Gospel Afterwards The Gourds Last Message Frontier Story The Barrow: a dialogue Thoughts of a Module The First Men on Mercury Spacepoem 3: Off Course A Too Hot Summer Itinerary Boxers Letters of Mr Lonelyhearts A Jar Revisited Pleasures of a Technological University The Computer's First Dialect Poems I The Furze Kidder's Bating (Northamptonshire) II The Birkie and the Howdie (Lowland Scots) The Computer's First Code Poem Not Playing the Game Rider i-v Guy Fawkes Moon Saturday Night Death in Duke Street Christmas Eve Stobhill Glasgow Sonnets i-x The New Divan (1977) The New Divan Memories of Earth Space Sonnet & Polyfilla Polyfilla Pictures Floating from the World The Reversals Twilight of a Tyranny The World A Girl Three Trees On John MacLean Vico's Song Sir Henry Morgan's Song Shaker Shaken Lévi-Strauss at the Lie-Detector Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath Ten Theatre Poems Five Poems on Film Directors School's Out Adventures of the Anti-sage The Divide Smoke The Beginning The Planets The Question Resurrections Unfinished Poems Star Gate: Science Fiction Poems (1979) INSTAMATIC THE MOON FEBRUARY 1973 The Worlds Particle Poems i-vi Era Foundation A Home in Space The Mouth The Clone Poem The Moons of Jupiter Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto Uncollected Poems (1976-1981) The Rock The Mummy Five Waiting Poems Instructions to an Actor The Archaeopteryx's Song A Good Year for Death Migraine Attack At Central Station Winter New Year Sonnets i-x Surrealism Revisited Interview Ore Stele Gorgon Fountain Book Mt. Caucasus On the Water Moving House Home on the Range On the Needle's Point In the Bottle Jordanstone Sonnets i-iii Caliban Falls Asleep in the Isle Full of Noises Iran The Coals On the Train i-iii A Riddle A Pair of Cats Little Blue Blue Eve and Adam Grendel Tarkovsky in Glasgow Jack London in Heaven Cinquevalli Sonnets from Scotland (1984) Slate Carboniferous Post-Glacial In Argyll The Ring of Brodgar Silva Caledonia Pilate at Fortingall The Mirror The Picts Colloquy in Glaschu Memento Matthew Paris At Stirling Castle, 1507 Thomas Young, M.A. (St Andrews) Lady Grange on St Kilda Theory of the Earth Poe in Glasgow De Quincey in Glasgow Peter Guthrie Tait, Topologist G.M. Hopkins in Glasgow 1893 The Ticket North Africa Caledonian Antisyzygy Travellers (1) Travellers (2) Seferis on Eigg Matt McGinn Post-Referendum Gangs After a Death Not the Burrell Collection 1983 A Place of Many Waters The Poet in the City The Norn (1) The Norn (2) The Target After Fallout The Age of Heracleum Computer Error: Neutron Strike Inward Bound The Desert The Coin The Solway Canal A Scottish Japanese Print Outward Bound On Jupiter Clydegrad A Golden Age The Summons from Selected Poems (1985) Night Pillion from The Dictionary of Tea Cook in Hawaii The Break-In An Alphabet of Goddesses From the Video Box (1986) from Themes on a Variation (1988) The Dowser Variations on Omar Khayyám Stanzas The Room Dear man, my love goes out in waves Waking on a Dark Morning The Gurney The Bench Nineteen Kinds of Barley A Trace of Wings The Hanging Gardens of Babylon A Bobbed Sonnet for Code Cobber The Computer's First Birthday Card Byron at Sixty-Five Shakespeare: a Reconstruction To the Queen: a Reconstruction Chillon: a Reconstruction True Ease in Writing: a Reconstruction On Time: a Reconstruction Not Marble: a Reconstruction Halley's Comet The Gorbals Mosque Rules for Dwarf-Throwing The Bear Save the Whale Ball Dom Raja The Change Vereshchagin's Barrow Uncollected Poems (1949-1982) 'The Triumph of Life': a conclusion to Shelley's Poem Making a Poem Dogs round a Tree Instant Theatre Go Home A Child's Coat of Many Colours The Fleas Warning Poem The Moment of Death Blues and Peal: Concrete 1969 By the Fire The Furies Trilobites An Arran Death Heron Blackbirds Blackbird Marigolds The Blackbird The Dolphin's Song Northern Nocturnal The Glasgow Subway Poems The Budgie The Cat The Giraffe The Piranhas By the Preaching of the Word The Han Princess From Cathkin Braes: a View of Korea Friendly Village Black and Gold Hunger Spell Chicago North Side The Demolishers The Morning A New Book by Wittgenstein The Little White Rows of Scotland The Day the Sea Spoke Found Poem: the Executioner Found Poems My Uncle My Dog My Greenhouse Found Poem: Glasgow Found Poem: the Awakening Found Poems Small Holdings Rough Neuk Quarry and Pond Sta' o'Stable Evandale Glow-worms at Night Dunbar Highway at Night 'Jock Tamson's Bairns' at Dawn Gowrie in the Gloamin' Epilogue: Seven Decades Index of Titles Index of First Lines

About the Author :
Edwin Morgan was a professor of English at Glasgow University and retired in 1980. He has since been a visiting professor at Strathclyde University and at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Review :
Edwin Morgan is a poet with experience of laureateship: he was made Glasgow's first poet laureate in the autumn of 1999. Born in that city in 1920, Morgan's work is often considered alongside that of other Scottish Modernists such as Norman MacCaig, George Makay Brown, Iain Crichton Smith and Sorley MacLean. What kind of a poet is he? A hard question to answer with simplicity, because his interests and techniques, over the years have been remarkably varied. His Collected Poems, published by Carcanet in 1990, shows the range and scope of his work. In the 1960s he began to experiment with Concrete Poetry, where the typographic style, visual effect or the sound of the poem is as important as the words that make up the verse, the best known examples are probably 'The Computer's First Christmas Card' which begins: Jollymerry hollyberry jollyberry And The Loch Ness Monster's Song? Sssnnwhufffll? Hnwhufflhhnnwfl hnfl hfl? His interest in technology can be seen in volumes such as Instamatic Poems (1972) and From the Video Box (1986); both books address the interaction between the word, the image and the intermediaries we can use to convey those words and images. He was in the vanguard of Scots who began to address their urban landscape; his volume From Glasgow to Saturn appeared in 1973, eight years before Alasdair Gray's emblematic novel, Lanark. His experimentalism comes out of the solid ground of an understanding of poetic tradtion and form. He has written sonnets; he has imagined Lord Byron in the old age that the poet never reached; he has written librettos for opera and performed with the jazz saxophonist Tommy Smith. Not for nothing, it would seem, is the Centre for Creative Writing at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde named after him. Not only has he translated poetry out of many languages - Russian, Hungraian, French, Italian, Portuguese, to name a few - his translations of classics into Scots have won him high praise; his version of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac appeared in 1992; his Phedre, after Racine, in 2000. One might reasonably ask whether the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom as a whole, Andrew Motion, need feel threatened by this appointment; certainly, it's true to say - and the poet himself would be the last to deny it - that Motion's work is rooted in a particularly English (rather than British) tradition. His critical work has focused on writers such as Philip Larkin and John Keats; the writers he most admires, he has said, are: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and Larkin. Does this mean a narrow gaze? Not necessarily. It's worth nothing that it was as true of his most recent predecessors, Ted Hughes and John Betjeman. Art is strengthened by particularity and attention to detail; to range widely for the sheer sake of 'inclusiveness', would not necessarily be a virtue. This appointment may be just another sign of devolution, but it is certainly a sign that there is room, in the literary and cultural landscape, for many voices. What does a Poet Laureate do? He or she addresses the nation through poetry; and speaks on behalf of poetry too. That there should be more powerful voices raised on behalf of art and what art can do for all of us, is surely no bad thing.