Collected Poems

To catch 'in full sight' is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he

achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of

sequences, in the witty reification of words in concrete poems, in the

weird rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices; his

transforming imagination is democratic, generous and inclusive. Experiment

is joyful and enabling: even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the

poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. 'More than the

work of most poets,' writes Iain Crichton Smith, Morgan's poetry 'welcomes

the twentieth century, with its gadgets, its paradoxes, graffiti, new

languages, torn advertisements, unconscious jokes, voyages'

This volume includes Poems of Thirty Years (1982) and Themes on a

Variation (1988), together with some fifty uncollected poems from 1939 to

1982.