Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan is Scotland's major living poet, and Inventions of Modernity is the first book-length study of his work. Since the 1940s Morgan's poetry has been carving out an alternative to the conventional evolutions from Modernism to Postmodernism, creating instead a substantial body ofwriting that ranges from the sublime to the hilarious. Morgan develops radical and libertarian poetics in an encyclopaedia of forms; from Anglo-Saxon meter through sonnet-sequences to concrete poems, and including gay poetry, science fiction verse, and prize-winning translations into both Englishand Scots from numerous languages.

Edwin Morgan was born in 1920 in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow University where he later taught literature. He is much admired for his experimental writings, his ‘social’ poems, as well as for the diversity of his output. The present book comprises a chapter on Morgan’s early vision poems (which have received scant critical attention hitherto); two on his hodoiporika, The Cape of Good Hope and The New Divan; a chapter on his deployment of the grotesque mode, centred chiefly on the Instamatic Poems and The Whittrick; another on his adaptations of the elegy, in which Edgecombe propose a new genre called the “thanasimon;” and, finally, an examination of his various monologic poems, read in terms of his avowed enterprise of “voicing” the universe. The study is topped by a prologue that sets out the consistency of Morgan’s vision over time, and tailed by an epilogue that connects his various critical pronouncements to his remarkably diverse output.

Edwin Morgan, Scotland's poet laureate, ia an internationally renowned and widely anthologised writer. This is his first new collection of poems in over four years.

In A Voyage', which opens Edwin Morgan's new book, he takes a cinematic risk, evoking the journey of the human sperm from ejaculation to fertilization. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1996, the poem opened new possibilities on the air as it does on the page. It belongs with Morgan's poems of space exploration, celebrating the chanciness and heroism of this most primal risk, and with his poetry of science. It also belongs with his love poems, performing a comprehensive synthesis of concerns. Three sequences complete this ambitious book. Beasts of Scotland' was commissioned by the Glasgow International Jazz Festival and set to music by the saxophonist Tommy Smith. Like The Five-Pointed Star', written for the Burns Bicentenary of 1996, Beasts' shows how commissioned, occasional poetry can at once honor and transcend its occasion. The title sequence of fifty triplet poems considers the consequences to reality of notions of virtual reality'. Once again Morgan displays his versatility and his rooted passion for language, for place and for real people living in a modern world that can merit celebration, laughter and (however hard-won) joy. No wonder his work, with its Scottish and European perspectives, is at once sophisticated and popular.

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 (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern poetry. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death in 2010, in his long life he produced an incredible range of work, from the playful to the profound. This INTERNATIONAL COMPANION gives a comprehensive overview of Morgan's poetry and drama. A range of expert contributors guide the reader along Morgan's astonishing, multi-faceted trajectory through space and time, and provide students with an essential and accessible general introduction to his life and work.