Candia McWilliam, The Glasgow Herald

Beyond expression

Edwin Morgan weds exquisite craft to issues as diverse as cancer, the Big Bang and love. Candia Williams pays homage

Not all poets make poetry because they think like that, feel like that, work like that; because they cannot help generating the stuff, because it comes out of their life with all the ease or unease or downright difficulty of other things a body makes. (All suggestions of bodily functions are wholly intentional; there is a delightful jeu d'esprit here about Morgan's octopus-induced diarrhoea on a train; you'd better believe that is among the most 'prettily' turned poems in this technically fascinating collection. The poet is a true wit.)

Edwin Morgan, the Makar of Scotland, does make poetry as a generous product of full-felt life, and this - best get the bad news over with - is a man with prostate cancer who is 87 years old; neither illness nor death does anything but get him to write about it, face to face.

His dialogue between a cancer cell, Gorgo, and Beau, a healthy cell, has a mix of modes from pantomime to mock-heroic that leaves the reader tingly with life. It is interesting that, while his work is sympathetic to most forms of shame, it is merciless about the saving of face (there is a scunner here at Emperor Hirohito). This is poetry that sets up no embarrassment in the reader, not at all an invariable case with confessional or indeed 'love' poets. Of course, embarrassment has its aesthetic uses but not in the work of this poet at this stage. He is afire with directness, with getting life out to us, and my word, we should be grateful.

Technically, the absence of embarrassment relates to his prosodic energy and his vivid address. He cannot whine or wheedle. There is a bracing hurtle to his work. Try saying to yourself: 'The oncogene, the oncogene, it squats in the DNA / As proud and mim as a puddock, and will not go away', and not getting a dancer's pumping in your heart. Morgan is so thrillingly clever and lavish that he tones us, his readers, up. Who'd thought, before he slipped in that mim puddock, that oncogene is indeed 'unco', with all that word suggests of oddity, extremity and the thing that Edwin Morgan has no time for, conformity or couthness, though he has all the time in the world for life?

To spend three or so days in the close multifarious company of this new collection of his work is to be blazed around by his strong-voiced, supple and inordinate power. His extraordinary gift is to write work at once intense, painful and invigorating. He successfully takes on subjects almost too enormous for words. For example, in one sequence, 'Planet Waves', half of which was originally written for performance at the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival in 1997, he begins at the very beginning (20 billion BC): 'Don't ask me and don't tell me. I was there. It was a bang and it was big' moves forward 17 billion years: 'Don't you want to be thankful? You suffer too much? I'll give you suffering, but first comes thanks' and takes in the Great Flood: 'So, what to do? Oh never underestimate those feeble scrabbling painting gill-less beings!'

He dares, in his second, subsequent part of what is nothing less than a history song, to confront the attacks on the Twin Towers. In the earlier The Mongols (1200 - 1300AD), the mortal consequences of understanding's failure already raised up its long shadow:

The Pope sent a letter to the Great Khan,saying
'We do not understand you. Why do you not obey?
We are under the direct command of Heaven.'
The Great Khan replied to the Pope, saying
'We do not understand you. Why do you not obey?
We are under the direct command of Heaven.'

It would be pusillanimous to cut any brief quotation from The Twin Towers section, which rises to the impossible occasion by the deployment of anger and pathos, and that sheer requirement of the 'occasioned' poem, sincerity. In the same sequence, Morgan, a terrific player of every trick in the book - from his beloved tropes, inversion and near, but emphatically not, repetition, to waltzing, to alliterative acoustical accumulations - actually achieves (in the Woodstock section) something very close to the spangly electrical cadenzas of Jimi Hendrix. 'What is truth worth? How can I sing about so much blood?' asks the Carmelite Robert Baston in Morgan's translation of Metrum de Proelio Apud Bannockburn. He'd answered himself before, of course, in the work:

Guile is not my style. Justice and peace
are what I would show.
Anyone who has more is store, let him write
the score.
My mind is numb, my voice half dumb, my
art a blur.

Having read the poem he has made, we know that this is a true lie. Of Rimbaud, meanwhile, Morgan asks: 'Can you once be a poet and live? Well, can you?'

What luck that he has lived and has remained a poet lifelong. It's maybe the love poems in this book that will choke you. There's passionately conveyed love of Scotland, of freedom, of civic decency (now that is not an easy thing to do in verse), tender observation of an old woman whose life 'has put all that away', a miraculous pair of poems about Titania and Tatyana, and, a long gift of verses to his loves in a life:

I loved you. You must know
It was truly so, although
As clay in clay you cannot catch my thanks, my steadiness, my lateness, my praise.

These last poems are addressed to his lover of today who is away for two months in Italy; the poet is in age, ailing in a house surrounded by scaffolding, pigeon-haunted, at home - and undimmed.

Scrivimi', you write
I do, I will, all right!

The scaffolding is removed and things, without it, remain standing. Thank God he writes to us, as well as to his love.