Edwin Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920 and lived there for most of his life. He attended the University of Glasgow, left to join the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940, returned to the university in 1946, and remained there as a lecturer until his retirement in 1980. In 2000 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His collections include The Horseman’s Word: A Sequence of Concrete Poems, Instamatic Poems, Sonnets from Scotland, Newspoems, Hold Hands among the Atoms: 70 Poems, Virtual and Other Realities and A Book of Lives. His translations, mostly into Scots, include Beowulf, Cyrano de Bergerac and Phèdre. In 2004 he was named as the first Makar for Scotland. He died in August 2010.
The rumour of my death has long abated. The Greeks still love me, but I don’t love Greeks Except for one – or two; I must be fated To wander and to change; when the mast creaks I smell the salt and know my soul unsated Until it finds the language no man speaks. And what is that? some simpleton demands Who’s never heard the seething of the sands.
No seething here, though, or...
Poems of science and science fiction, history and politics, love poems, comic poems, social realist or surrealist poems, dialogues and monologues, newspaper poems, Beat poems, concrete poems,...
This is Ciaran Carson’s second collection of poems. His first, The New Estate (1976), revealed an intricate, lyrical poet intensely aware of traditional Irish cultures, and concerned to...
One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin...
Literary travellers, getting off the train at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, must have wondered if there are other cities which can boast a main point of entry, an introductory landmark, named...
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