William Wootten, The Times Literary Supplement

Eternal optimist

Bind Edwin Morgan in a nutshell and he's likely to call himself a king of infinite space. Eighty-seven years old, suffering from prostate cancer, and, for the most part, confined to a room in a nursing home, Morgan continues to write poems that travel the earth and universe as if they had all the time in the world - rather more in the case of the 20,000,002,300 year sequence 'Planet Wave', which starts with the Big Bang and finishes with the man's colonization of another solar system. Morgan will imagine himself as the Emperor Hirohito or Oscar Wilde, or repaint Raeburn's Reverend Walker, letting him drop through the ice.

Which is not to say that the poems in A Book of Lives are an escape from the poet's condition. The narrator of 'An Old Woman's Birthday' pines: 'I don't have a budgie in a cage / but I am one'. Caged birds are there again in 'Boethius', where a version of a lament of the late Roman prefaces a powerful depiction of his incarceration. There's talk of cancer too; and, in 'Gorgo and Beau', talk by cancer, as a cancer cell and a healthy one have words with each another.

'Acknowledge the Unacknowledged Legislators' responds to Auden's 'Poetry makes nothing happen' with a firm 'I do not go along with it. No I don't'. Morgan's keenness on poetry's public function helped make him a natural choice for Scotland's Makar, a role he appears to be relishing. 'For the Opening of The Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004' tells the newly acknowledged legislators how they ought to go about their job, and is that rare thing: a poem for a state occasion that you'd actually want to read. 'Lines for Wallace' and the 'Cost of Pearls' show Morgan's sense of history and nation and his righteous indignation as keen as ever.

Morgan, who has become rather fond of the role of sage, declares in 'The War on the War on Terror' 'I know what I am talking about, I / have been right through life like an arrow'. The poem is an imaginary reply to a woman whom Morgan overhears saying 'she could not bear / To bring a child into a world so dreadful / It scoops up smoking body parts like that'. 'The War on the War on Terror' may conclude that 'the greatest gift it is possible to make / Is life itself', but this is as angry and tough-minded an expression of the sentiment as you'll chance upon. Throughout A Book of Lives, whether in response to Morgan's own circumstances or the world's, Morgan's life-affirmation and optimism are at their steeliest.

There are interesting moments when poems seem less sure of their ground. Commemorating a visit to the tomb of Lenin and Stalin the year before the Hungarian Uprising, '1955 - A Recollection' suggests much, but leaves us guessing quite how Morgan's belief in socialist modernity and his fascination with twentieth-century Russia came to terms with the reality of the Soviet Union. In 'Planet Wave', awe at the power of devotion and the Will keep pointing to a disturbing reality that is a far cry from Morgan's more hopeful visions of mankind. When a Viking woman volunteers to have sex with the loyal followers of a departed lord, before being ritually sacrificed, the narrator of the sequence - call him Edwin Morgan or the eternal optimist - merely comments 'do you want to know what you should feel? / I can't tell you, but feel you must. My story's real'. As often with Morgan, it's the dark glimpses which most draw the eye.

For all that, A Book of Lives is full of brightness and good humour. It also reaffirms Morgan's quality as a love poet. The sequence 'Love and Life' comes in stanzas like stretched, stuffed limericks whose rhymes prove surprisingly effective in helping Morgan to mix his wry humour with the lyrical and disquisitional. Perhaps responding to the interest of a more liberal - and more prurient - age, Morgan supplies lovers' names, times and places, as he used not to, and makes the homosexual and, in the case of one relationship, heterosexual, nature of that love explicit. Intertwined with this are passages on dinosaurs and crocodiles, a partial diary of missing a loved one, and reflections on what happens when Maud decides not to come into the garden after all. In purer mode, 'Valentine Weather' and 'Three Songs' show Morgan's lyric voice at it's sweetest and most affecting.

In A Book of Lives, old age tends to be an occasion for celebration: not just in the case of the birthdays of David Daiches or Ian Hamilton Finlay, but also in the dragon-filled dreams of an old man's snooze. It's a celebration that can be extended to the vigour and inventiveness of a poet who still has more lives than a litter of kittens.