At seventy I thought I had come through,
like parting a bead curtain at Port Said,
to something that was shadowy before,
figures and voices of late times that might
be surprising yet. The beads clash faintly
behind me as I go forward. No candle-light
please, keep that for Europe. Switch the whole thing
right on. When I go in I want it bright,
I want to catch whatever is there
in full sight.


from 'Epilogue: Seven Decades'
           

Edwin Morgan 'catches in full sight' in his lyric epiphanies, in the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily relocation of words in concrete poems, the weird rhythms of sound poems. His transforming imagination is democratic, generous and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules.

'More than the work of most poets,' writes lain 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, Themes on a Variation, and some fifty uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

Preface
Prologue: Sculpture


Dies Irae (1952)
Dies Irae
Stanzas of the Jeopardy
'What waves have beaten…'
A Warning of Waters at Evening
The Sleights of Darkness
The Sleights of Time
Sleight-of-Morals
Harrowing Heaven, 1924
From the Anglo-Saxon:
The Ruin
The Seafarer
The Wanderer
Riddles: Swallows; Swan; Bookworm; Storm
From the Middle English:
The Grave

The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952)
The Vision of Cathkin Braes
A Courtly Overture
Ingram Lake or, Five Acts on the House
A Snib for the Nones
Verses for a Christmas Card
A Song of the Petrel

The Cape of Good Hope (1955)
The Cape of Good Hope


The Whittrick: a Poem in Eight Dialogues (1961; first published as a whole, 1973)

from Newspoems (1965-1971)
Notice in Hell
Notice in Heaven
Sick Man
Charon's Song
Forgetful Duck
Möbius's Bed
Come In Old Cock
Idyll
New English Riddles: 1
Advice to a Corkscrew
Unpublished Poems by Creeley: 2
Visual soundpoem

from Emergent Poems (1967)
Plea
Dialeck Piece
Nightmare
Manifesto

from Gnomes (1968)
Strawberry Fields Forever
Archives
Astrodome
The Computer's Second Christmas Card

The Second Life (1968)
The Old Man and the Sea
The Death of Marilyn Monroe
Je ne regrette rien
The Domes of St Sophia
The White Rhinoceros
The Third Day of the Wolf
Aberdeen Train
The Opening of the Forth Road Bridge
To Hugh MacDiarmid
To Ian Hamilton Finlay
An Addition to the Family
Canedolia
Starryveldt
Message Clear
Bees' Nest
French Persian Cats Having a Ball
Orgy
To Joan Eardley
Linoleum Chocolate
Good Friday
The Starlings in George Square
King Billy
Glasgow Green
The Suspect
In the Snack-bar
Trio
Pomander
Summer Haiku
Siesta of a Hungarian Snake
Boats and Places
Seven Headlines
The Computer's First Christmas Card
Opening the Cage
The Chaffinch Map of Scotland
The Second Life
The Sheaf
The Unspoken
From a City Balcony
When you go
Strawberries
The Witness
One Cigarette
The Picnic
Absence
Without It
The Welcome
O Pioneers!
Construction for I. K. Brunel
Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly
The Tower of Pisa
Spacepoem 1: From Laika to Gagarin
Chinese Cat
Islands
In Sobieski's Shield
From the Domain of Arnheim
For the International Poetry Incarnation
What is 'Paradise Lost' really about?
The Ages
A View of Things


from Penguin Modern Poets 15 (1969)
The Flowers of Scotland

The Horseman's Word (1970)
Arabian Nights Magic Horse
Clydesdale
Newmarket
Centaur
Eohippus
Kelpie
Hrimfaxi
Zane's
Hortobágy
Elegy

from Instamatic Poems (1972)
GLASGOW 5 MARCH 1971
('With a ragged diamond')
GLASGOW 5 MARCH 1971
('Quickly the magistrate')
NICE 5 MARCH 1971
CHICAGO MAY 1971
GERMANY DECEMBER 1970
NIGERIA UNDATED REPORTED OCTOBER 1971
LEATHERHEAD SURREY SEPTEMBER 1971
AVIEMORE INVERNESSSHIRE AUGUST 1971
MOUGINS PROVENCE SEPTEMBER 1971
VENICE APRIL 1971
LONDON JUNE 1970
ROCKALL INVERNESSSHIRE JUNE 1972
ELLINGHAM SUFFOLK JANUARY 1972
LANCASHIRE NOVEMBER 1971
WASHINGTON SEPTEMBER 1971
TRANSLUNAR SPACE MARCH 1972
BANGAON INDIA JULY 1971
GLASGOW OCTOBER 1971
BRADFORD JUNE 1972
CAMPOBASSO ITALY UNDATED REPORTED MARCH 1971
LONDON NOVEMBER 1971
('At the Festival of Islam')
GLASGOW NOVEMBER 1971
('It is a fine thronged…')
GLASGOW NOVEMBER 1971
('The "speckled pipe" of the MacCrimmons')
MILAN UNDATED REPORTED OCTOBER 1971


From Glasgow to Saturn (1973)
Columba's Song
Floating off to Timor
In Glasgow
Kierkegaard's Song
Tropic
Shantyman
Oban Girl
The Woman
The Apple's Song
Drift
Fado
After the Party
At the Television Set
From the North
The Milk-cart
Estranged
For Bonfires i-iii
Blue Toboggans
Song of the Child
Lord Jim's Ghost's Tiger Poem
Flakes
Hyena
The Loch Ness Monster's Song
The Mill
London:
I St James's Park
II Soho
III The Post Office Tower
Interferences: a sequence of 9 poems
Che
The Fifth Gospel
Afterwards
The Gourds
Last Message
Frontier Story
The Barrow: a dialogue
Thoughts of a Module
The First Men on Mercury
Spacepoem 3: Off Course
A Too Hot Summer
Itinerary
Boxers
Letters of Mr Lonelyhearts
A Jar Revisited
Pleasures of a Technological University
The Computer's First Dialect Poems
I The Furze Kidder's Bating (Northamptonshire)
II The Birkie and the Howdie (Lowland Scots)
The Computer's First Code Poem
Not Playing the Game
Rider i-v
Guy Fawkes Moon
Saturday Night
Death in Duke Street
Christmas Eve
Stobhill
Glasgow Sonnets i-x


The New Divan (1977)
The New Divan
Memories of Earth
Space Sonnet & Polyfilla
Polyfilla
Pictures Floating from the World
The Reversals
Twilight of a Tyranny
The World
A Girl
Three Trees
On John MacLean
Vico's Song
Sir Henry Morgan's Song
Shaker Shaken
Lévi-Strauss at the Lie-Detector
Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath
Ten Theatre Poems
Five Poems on Film Directors
School's Out
Adventures of the Anti-sage
The Divide
Smoke
The Beginning
The Planets
The Question
Resurrections
Unfinished Poems

Star Gate: Science Fiction Poems (1979)
INSTAMATIC THE MOON FEBRUARY 1973
The Worlds
Particle Poems i-vi
Era
Foundation
A Home in Space
The Mouth
The Clone Poem
The Moons of Jupiter
Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto

Uncollected Poems (1976-1981)
The Rock
The Mummy
Five Waiting Poems
Instructions to an Actor
The Archaeopteryx's Song
A Good Year for Death
Migraine Attack
At Central Station
Winter
New Year Sonnets i-x
Surrealism Revisited
Interview
Ore
Stele
Gorgon
Fountain
Book
Mt. Caucasus
On the Water
Moving House
Home on the Range
On the Needle's Point
In the Bottle
Jordanstone Sonnets i-iii
Caliban Falls Asleep in the Isle Full of Noises
Iran
The Coals
On the Train i-iii
A Riddle
A Pair of Cats
Little Blue Blue
Eve and Adam
Grendel
Tarkovsky in Glasgow
Jack London in Heaven
Cinquevalli


Sonnets from Scotland (1984)
Slate
Carboniferous
Post-Glacial
In Argyll
The Ring of Brodgar
Silva Caledonia
Pilate at Fortingall
The Mirror
The Picts
Colloquy in Glaschu
Memento
Matthew Paris
At Stirling Castle, 1507
Thomas Young, M.A. (St Andrews)
Lady Grange on St Kilda
Theory of the Earth
Poe in Glasgow
De Quincey in Glasgow
Peter Guthrie Tait, Topologist
G.M. Hopkins in Glasgow
1893
The Ticket
North Africa
Caledonian Antisyzygy
Travellers (1)
Travellers (2)
Seferis on Eigg
Matt McGinn
Post-Referendum
Gangs
After a Death
Not the Burrell Collection
1983
A Place of Many Waters
The Poet in the City
The Norn (1)
The Norn (2)
The Target
After Fallout
The Age of Heracleum
Computer Error: Neutron Strike
Inward Bound
The Desert
The Coin
The Solway Canal
A Scottish Japanese Print
Outward Bound
On Jupiter
Clydegrad
A Golden Age
The Summons

from Selected Poems (1985)
Night Pillion
from The Dictionary of Tea
Cook in Hawaii
The Break-In
An Alphabet of Goddesses

From the Video Box (1986)

from Themes on a Variation (1988)
The Dowser
Variations on Omar Khayyám
Stanzas
The Room
Dear man, my love goes out in waves
Waking on a Dark Morning
The Gurney
The Bench
Nineteen Kinds of Barley
A Trace of Wings
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
A Bobbed Sonnet for Code Cobber
The Computer's First Birthday Card
Byron at Sixty-Five
Shakespeare: a Reconstruction
To the Queen: a Reconstruction
Chillon: a Reconstruction
True Ease in Writing: a Reconstruction
On Time: a Reconstruction
Not Marble: a Reconstruction
Halley's Comet
The Gorbals Mosque
Rules for Dwarf-Throwing
The Bear
Save the Whale Ball
Dom Raja
The Change
Vereshchagin's Barrow


Uncollected Poems (1949-1982)
'The Triumph of Life': a conclusion to Shelley's Poem
Making a Poem
Dogs round a Tree
Instant Theatre Go Home
A Child's Coat of Many Colours
The Fleas
Warning Poem
The Moment of Death
Blues and Peal: Concrete 1969
By the Fire
The Furies
Trilobites
An Arran Death
Heron
Blackbirds
Blackbird Marigolds
The Blackbird
The Dolphin's Song
Northern Nocturnal
The Glasgow Subway Poems
The Budgie
The Cat
The Giraffe
The Piranhas
By the Preaching of the Word
The Han Princess
From Cathkin Braes: a View of Korea
Friendly Village
Black and Gold
Hunger
Spell
Chicago North Side
The Demolishers
The Morning
A New Book by Wittgenstein
The Little White Rows of Scotland
The Day the Sea Spoke
Found Poem: the Executioner
Found Poems
My Uncle
My Dog
My Greenhouse
Found Poem: Glasgow
Found Poem: the Awakening
Found Poems
Small Holdings
Rough Neuk Quarry and Pond
Sta' o'Stable
Evandale Glow-worms at Night
Dunbar Highway at Night
'Jock Tamson's Bairns' at Dawn
Gowrie in the Gloamin'

Epilogue: Seven Decades

Index of Titles
Index of First Lines