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With Sweeping out the Dark Carcanet celebrates twenty one years of publishing Edwin Morgan's poems, prose and translations. Morgan's work, with Scottish and European perspectives, is both sophisticated and popular. As poet, essayist and translator he is well known to readers in Scotland and throughout the English-speaking world.
The work in this book, his first major volume since Collected Poems (1990) which marked his seventieth birthday, shows him to be as inventive and engaging-as engaged-as ever. The questions we ask today-where are we? where are we going?-the political changes of recent years, problems of urban violence and squalor, the re-awakening of community involvement, all find a place. The book also includes translations of Claudian, Michelangelo, Leopardi, Montale, Pushkin, Blok, Mayakovsky, Jozsef and Aigi.
Awards won by Edwin Morgan:, 2000 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
Praise for Edwin Morgan:'Edwin Morgan is the most dynamic, brilliant, free-wheeling poet around, endlessly accessible and inventive, glorious refreshment.' The Scotsman
'Morgan's poetry has always been large, vigorous and imaginative. It has been energetic and various.' lain Crichton Smith
'There seems no subject Morgan cannot alight upon with his effervescent art.' The Scotsman
'Morgan is just as capable of taking the breath away in cool, stanzaic English, as in roustabout Scots free verse.' VERSE
'For the range of his inventiveness, the generosity of his imagination, the moral alertness of his social observation. Edwin Morgan is the man for me.' Carol Ann Duffy
'Edwin Morgan's poetry encompasses the whole world. ... he should be at least as famous as Hughes and Heaney.' Liz Lochhead
'Edwin Morgan is probably the writer most influential (in this) generation of Scottish poets.' Robert Crawford
'(Morgan) is still at the height of his powers as storyteller, polemicist, lyric poet and translator.' Alan Brownjohn
'Mr Morgan writes in a way which I would characterise as generous and forceful as well as immediately sensible.' The Scotsman
'Mr Morgan is as versatile as he is inventive ... the qualities that most appeal are a capacity for celebration ... and an unsentimental humaneness, a considering sympathy.' TLS
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