Don't ask me and don't tell me. I was there.
It was a bang and it was big. I don't know
what went before, I came out with it.
Think about that if you want my credentials.
Think about that, me, it, imagine it
as I recall it now, swinging in my spacetime hammock,
nibbling a moon or two, watching you.

from 'Planet Wave'

Edwin Morgan's original Selected Poems was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a new Collected and several individual volumes, as well as his essays and celebrated translations.

This New Selected Poems contains most of the work included in the popular 1985 volume, to which Morgan adds a wealth of later material. The complete sequence of Sonnets from Scotland appears in book form for the first time, the poems gaining in relevance now that Scotland's Parliament has been established. Morgan is the unofficial laureate of the new Scotland. Hitherto uncollected is the ambitious and magnificent Planet Wave, a suite of ten poems covering the history of the earth from the Big Bang to the time of Copernicus. It was set to music by the jazz saxophonist and composer Tommy Smith, and was first performed at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in 1997.

Morgan is unique among British poets in the range and courage of his experimentation, his openness to the poetries of other languages and to the poetry of science and science fiction. He explores language less as a medium than as an abundant, self-renewing human resource. However spectacular his leaps in time and space, he always comes back to ground in Scotland, in Glasgow, in a present tense which he inhabits with exuberance and hope, and without cultural regrets. He is a celebrator: his work, with its Scottish and European perspectives, is at once sophisticated and popular.