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I am surprised y'all, I mean ye all, all ye, all ye's, like (yon) Edwin (Mc)Morgan.
― the bluefox, Tuesday, 23 March 2004 21:28 (twenty years ago) link
i will wait for this moment happens to me, so sweet ,full of intimacy,love that smells of spring and youth
― aurora, Monday, 29 March 2004 11:20 (twenty years ago) link
five years pass...
Carcanet's New Selected Poems is an essential purchase. There's a tendency in Scottish Studies to overpraise writers for their, well, Scottishness, but Morgan really is a world class poet. And while he's identified with Glasgow, he's very much a cosmopolitan. He's an inspirational figure really.
Generations of Scottish school children have been introduced to concrete and sound poetry via him. How wonderful is that?
I've been reading and rereading his work lately as part of my masters dissertation. His Sonnets From Scotland from 1984 are superb. Having just read De Quincey's Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, Morgan's sonnett De Quincey In Glasgow really struck me. A visionary Glasgow poem - something Morgan, and sadly too few others, is a master at:
When afternoons grew late, he feared and longed
for dusk. In that high room in Rottenrow
he looks out east to the Necropolis
Its crowded tombs rise jostling, living, thronged
with shadows, and the granite-bloodying glow
flares on the dripping bronze of a used kris.
His love poems are beautiful. Deeply touching, but gorgeously sensuous too.
Of his concrete poems, this is a favourite:
Siesta of a Hungarian Snake
s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z
― Stew, Friday, 12 June 2009 21:59 (fourteen years ago) link
Interesting to see Crichton-Smith, Muir and Morgan come up on ILB. I read most of C-S and Muir's stuff many years ago, also some but less Morgan who seemed too wilfully cerebral for my tastes - admittedly an opinion based on a fairly superficial acquaintance. Strawberries is an obvious and very beautiful exception, although I know it from having heard it read more recently on tv or radio I think - I don't remember seeing it in print before I spotted this thread. In the end I thought CS a fairly modest talent tbh, and even Muir, though definitely more interesting, is a bit bloodless, going from dream-and-myth abstractions to moral abstractions without taking in much of the stink of life. His Autobiography is exceptional, more interesting than his poetry IMO, and he seems to have been an incredibly nice man.
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
nine years pass...
will gie it a listen when I'm hame (am at work at the mo)
loved reading edwin morgan in school. perhaps my favourite thing that i had to read for english class.
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Saturday, 9 March 2019 00:38 (five years ago) link