Newspaper Article

Edwin Morgan

Marsack, Robyn

2010

Overview

That first collection seems quite mannered now, used as we are to the immediacy of voice that characterises [Edwin Morgan]'s poetry as it developed. A Second Life, published in 1968, signalled a profound private change as well as public achievement: this was the volume that established Morgan's importance. In 1963 he had met and fallen in love with John Scott, to whom he remained attached - although they never lived together - until Scott's death in 1978. Given the repressive legislation and attitudes of the time, this was a concealed love, but for Morgan it represented a liberating reciprocity. It was paralleled by his discovery of the beat poets and other American exemplars such as Williams and Creeley: from them, he said, \"I really learned for the first time ... that you can write poetry about anything.\" In Poems of Thirty Years (1982), he portrays a playwright giving Instructions to an Actor: \"Forgiveness,\" he says, \"that's the thing. It's like a second life.\" One of the marvellous things about Morgan's poetry is the vivid variety of voices, the individuality of each, his ability to give us that without mimicry or judgment. The poet's steady gaze is never cold. He gives his subjects their second life. Whatever his eye lights on - the inner eye of the imagination as much as the eye of the tremendously observant citydweller - is given its form and authenticity. This sense of authentic expression extends to inanimate objects and even to creatures we have never seen. Inventing verse forms throughout his career - as late as Cathures (2002) he found a new stanzaic form- he was also a master of classic form. He demonstrated in his use of sonnets, particularly, how a construction in some ways \"rigid and exoskeletal\" yet shows what is \"living and provocative\" inside. The Glasgow Sonnets are a brilliant example, while the Sonnets from Scotland (published by [Hamish Whyte]'s Mariscat Press in 1984) remain the most significant Scottish collection of that decade. They look on this country from the perspective of time travellers or space voyagers, and offer a view of utter change. The change in history is summed up in The Coin, one side showing the head of a red deer, on the other \"the shock of Latin, like a gloss,/Respublica Scotorum ...\"

• Publisher: Gannett Media Corp
• Subject: Morgan, Edwin