Scotland On Sunday

Sunday 30th April 2000
Page SEVEN 12


For queen and country


NEW SELECTED POEMS
by Edwin Morgan
Carcanet, £7.95

Review by Colin Cardwell

EDWIN Morgan, Glasgow's poet laureate and recent winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry,
celebrated his 80th birthday last week. Radio Scotland planned to mark the event with a series
of readings which will include a Morgan poem on sperm donation that emphatically highlights the
octogenarian's pawky humour and total lack of pomposity: 'Ah thocht Glasgow was that macho/But
here we're doon tae wir last batch o/Sperm, the bank's near empty, Gode,/Ur therr nae real men to
loosen their load?' It will be interesting to see what Her Majesty makes of that one.

It is typical of the joyous demotic that breathes urgency and vitality into Morgan's poems about
Scotland, and particularly Glasgow. But combined with an obvious and deep affection for the city
of his birth, Morgan's free-hearted internationalism and insouciant eclecticism are appropriately
represented in this new collection, spanning works from 1952 to 1994.

Morgan is a poetic quidnunc whose roving eye lights on a cascade of variform subjects and objects:
a cigarette; a dosser dying in the street; jack London in Heaven; Rules for Dwarf Throwing - all
handled with consummate craftsmanship and rigour but splendidly accessible and free from
self-conscious artifice.

Glasgow Sonnets, from 1973, underscores the hawk eye for detail, the grit combined with
compassion that we associate with Morgan the urban poet: "A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the
close./Late shadows lengthen slowly, slogans fade./The YY PARTICK TOI grins from its shade like
the last strains of some lost libera nos a malo."

A decade later, in Sonnets from Scotland he still displays a sure ability to delineate a scene;
evoke a sense of time and place: 'Infinitely variable water/let seals bob in your silk or loll on
Mull/where the lazy fringes rustle; let hull and screw slew you round, blind heavy daughter
feeling for shores".

While Canedolia underscores his capacity for sheer intellectual delight, this time playing with
the exuberant nonsense of Scottish place names: "what do you do? we foindle and fungle, we
bonkle and meigle and maxpoffle. we scotstarvit, armit, wormit and even whifflet."

Beyond our spatial and temporal borders, Planet Wave, set to music by jazz saxophonist Tommy
Smith pans from the Big Bang: 'Don't ask me and don't tell me. I was there. It was a bang and it
was big" to Copernicus: "I looked from the roof till it dark and starry, I and knew my travels
were just beginning; the Magellanic Clouds/ wait for those who have climbed Magellan's shrouds.
" - a characteristically inventive, whimsical series of dioramas.

Morgan at 80 - the English professor and the man at the Gorbals bus stop - remains an impressive
poetic presence on the national and international stage. With a combination of supreme
craftsmanship, generosity of spirit and intellectual glee he has been one of the principal forces
to have impelled Scottish poetry out of the kailyard and, crucially, inspired an exciting
generation that includes Kathleen Jamie, WN Herbert and Don Paterson - a generation whose
Scottishness ranges, says Morgan, "from the rabid to the near-invisible."

Plangent, piquant, compassionate, mordant, tender - his poetic palette is prodigiously varied
and vivid and this collection spans the best of an incisive and humane talent.