Whether in the individual poem, the sequence or the collection, Edwin Morgan makes a plurality of styles into a thoroughgoing eclecticism. At once unpretentious and daring his range of production over the past twenty-five years is almost worryingly wide. His wit has done as much as anything to make the "Concrete" and "Sound" poem respectable and accessible. His refusal to decry the contemporary or to set barriers between modes has led to poems using, for example, the terms of spa...

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 c...

[Morgan] makes statements, lots of them, and his poems are not ingenious but deeply intelligent. Since the death of Auden, who brought a tremendous range of speculation and knowledge into his poetry, Morgan seems to me to stand out almost unchallenged as a poet of ideas. In case I seem to be saying that Morgan is a poet like Auden, let me add at once that he has nothing like the same gift for the felicitous phrase and is altogether a heavier, more viscous writer. He resembles Auden only insofar as the two o...

Edwin Morgan is a Scottish poet who has achieved original and interesting results by employing experimental methods which dislocate conventional poetic vocabulary and syntax…. At a technical level, however, Morgan is also rooted firmly in traditional modes of writing. His poetry ranges, therefore, from original work in English and Scots (including translation from several European languages) to linguistic games of chance, many of which are certainly more anarchically neo-modernist than anything by [I...

[Poems of Thirty Years] brings together a vast amount of original work remarkable for its variety and skill. The skill is sometimes frittered away on sound and concrete poems, which may be fun to write and to utter but are not much fun to read. There are also elegies which feel merely dutiful and love poems notable for their lack of any intense feeling at all; yet these failures do not greatly matter. Morgan's imagination is not much stirred by the purely personal, but against that is the fact that h...

Perhaps because pity is the predominant sentiment of Glasgow Sonnets, as I read them, run a close second by indignation, the poor of that city appear as if at a distance, much as Larkin observed Whitsun weddings though the animating sentiments are so different, so sympathetic. Life in the run-down area of Glasgow is characterized (in sociologically relevant terms) rather than described. One is more moved, ultimately, by the poet's attitudes than by his subject. Which is to say that the sonnets fail b...

The thirty years in the title of [Poems of Thirty Years] run from 1952 to 1982 and over this period Edwin Morgan has been remarkably productive…. Abroad he is perhaps best known for his concrete poems, poems such as 'The Computer's First Christmas Card' and 'The Loch Ness Monster's Song' where he plays with permutations of sounds, words and shapes on the page. Play, improvisation, surprise discoveries are central to his idea of poetry. Although he often write...

Morgan's range is wide. Wide enough, in fact, to touch both of the antagonistic poles of Scottish poetry—Ian Hamilton Finlay and Hugh MacDiarmid—and an amazingly large number of points along the way between them. The trouble with being versatile and working in many forms is that readers (and especially critics) will want one thing or another, this sort of poem or that. Even though the possibility exists that a book manifesting widely divergent techniques can achieve a shape and identity...

[The Second Life] contains straightforward verse and (printed on differently-coloured paper) concrete poems. [Morgan] is certainly the wittiest and least pretentious practitioner of con-Edwin (George) Morgan 1920– Photograph by Jessie Ann Matthew, Courtesy of Edwin Morgancrete poetry, in which his range extends from the charming piece that plays variations on the word 'pomander' to social comments like Starryveldt, in wh...

Edwin Morgan's Poems of Thirty Years is a curate's egg of a book. Large stretches of it are only intermittently comprehensible (e.g. 'The New Divan'), it contains a great deal of versified sci-fi which can be of interest only to aficionados of that genre, and a lot of the earlier verse verges on the worst kind of 1940s apocalyptic twaddle (it was I think a mistake to include the hitherto unpublished 'Dies Irae' of 1952). On the other hand, many of the poems display ...

From Glasgow to Saturn collects, interestingly, most of the many facets of Morgan's poetic personality: one gets for the first time some sense of the whole oeuvre, not just glimpses of his work as a writer of lyrical love poems, or sci-fi fantasies, or slightly loaded whimsicalities in 'concrete', or excursions into horror which suggest a George MacBeth without the fastidiousness or the zany charisma. All that said, it's an uneven book. The love lyrics derive only too plainly fro...

Edwin Morgan's prodigious talent has [in The Second Life] produced one of the most refreshing collections of poems I have read. They range in tone from light to serious, and from the real to fantasy. The book includes groups of experimental poems: some concrete poetry and some permutations on sounds and letters which produce fascinating results…. Included are some powerful poems in memory of Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, and Edith Piaf. But the major group of poems is linked to the title poem, an...

[Morgan's semi-concrete] poems must be taken in their entirety or not at all. They will not be fragmented (which is, I take it, the justification for their existence). They are among the best things in his varied book, The Second Life. There are more conventional poems, equally intelligent, but they seem embarrassed by the nakedness of the emotions expressed, which are too often dour and dreary. A lot of the poems are about looking back and feeling miserable…. The Second Life is worth reading,...

Most of [From Glasgow to Saturn] is graduate school diddling with all kinds of neat-o stuff: science fiction, American westerns, typographic calisthenics, computer creation, voice inversion. Some of it is coffee-break cute, much of it simply silly. Remarkable are a few love lyrics scattered at the beginning of the book, two prose poems near its middle, and especially the series of ten "Glasgow Sonnets" that close it. It's a shame that such substantial achievement has been dumped in a pl...