Poetry, Edwin Morgan says, should 'acknowledge its environment'. It can do this in the development of its themes, in its imagery—drawing from particulars of place and time—or in its approach to language, reproducing in the word order or in the word itself specific processes of the environment. In a sequence of poems called 'Interferences', for instance, the failure of language in various extreme circumstances is expressed in the deformation of certain words at the climax of the experience; in the 'Glasgow Sonnets' the references are drawn directly from the city, its history and the present; and in the Science Fiction poems the themes relate to actual human ambitions and actions, with analogies to actual experience, but carried into other spheres—'imaginative poetry exploring time and space'…. The poems are memorable as plots and occasionally as rhythms, but phrases and lines seldom stay in the mind, except from the lyrics. Morgan is drawn towards 'directness' and 'realism', though he recognizes the danger in over-directness. (p. 314)
[Morgan] has come to prefer the poetry that emerges from newspaper stories, small incidents, 'what time barely kept', to poetry that built on earlier verse, and to poetry of subjective experience and observation. Hence he has written 'instamatic' poems and other incidental pieces to capture, and in captivity to explore, 'what actually happens'. The long series of Instamatic Poems (1972) attempt a photographic immediacy. They are unfortunately thin linguistically, neither particularly accurate nor evocative. The language, coldly used, aspires to be a lens. In the best of them—'Mougins Provence September 1971', for instance—he achieves an almost surreal effect by suspending the real moment, without its cause or aftermath, in a perpetual present. It is the surrealism of photography. But few of these experiments are successful.
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