| Author | Message | ||
     Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.208.147 |
The poet Edwin Morgan has just died at the age of ninety, following a bout of pneumonia. He had been seriously ill for years, but carried on producing great work. His poetry – exemplified by the collection From Glasgow to Saturn (1973) was versatile and breathtakingly intense, encompassing political anger, eroticism, science fiction, social observation and literary fantasy. My favourite Morgan quote is from his poem 'Grendel': It is being nearly human gives me this spectacular darkness. The light does not know what to do with me. Morgan was a major poet, but there was no pomposity or self-regard about him. He was a shy man who let his work speak for itself. And it did. He spoke of the loneliness and violence of city life, the dark energy of human passion, the unfulfilled potential of the future. Like Auden and Neruda, he tried to write poetry worthy of humanity rather than declaring humanity to be unworthy of poetry. One more quote, from Morgan's brilliant sequence 'Glasgow Sonnets': ...No deliverer ever rose from these stone tombs to get the hell they made unmade. The same weans never make the grade. The same grey street sends back the ball it throws. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.6.209 |
Never heard of him, Joel! I will have to check him out. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.104.135.73 |
Yes. I'll check him out, too. I'm rather looking forward to your poetry collection coming out later this year, Joel. Does it have a title yet? | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.230.134 |
Morgan's early collections are out of print but his Selected Poems and a massive Collected Poems are available. Of his recent books I'd recommend Sweeping Out the Dark, Cathures and A Book of Lives. Landmark Morgan poems include 'The Second Life', 'Glasgow Green', 'Stobhill', 'Glasgow Sonnets', 'Grendel', 'Migraine Attack', 'The Break-in', 'Eros' and the sequence 'From the Video Box'. Ally, I'll e-mail you – wouldn't feel right to be talking about my work in this thread. Though Morgan is a big influence. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Commiserations on the death of your hero, Joel. I never heard of him but the lines you quoted above speak volumes. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.166.117.210 |
I'm ashamed to say that I've never heard of him, either. RIP. I'll certainly be trying the man's work. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.68 |
But what an age and what an achievement, Joel! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Absolutely, Ramsey – and Morgan didn't really find his voice as a poet until he was forty. Hence the poem 'The Second Life'. Then there was a third life after his retirement from Stirling University. He never lost his appetite for life, ideas, language and the future. Though when he was down – as in his poem 'A Black Dog Day' – you knew about it. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.166.117.210 |
I've just ordered a copy of his Selected Poems. The above extracts are so good that I simply had to. |