Edwin Morgan
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It must have been the summer of 1995, the summer following my first year at university. The book was Edwin Morgan’s Themes on a Variation, borrowed from the Scottish Poetry Library, which was still crammed into Tweeddale Court at the time. The beach was Cocklawburn near Berwick-upon-Tweed — a favourite of my family’s for heaven
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Just read on Todd Swift’s Eyewear blog that James McGonigal won the Michael Marks pamphlet award for his new chapbook Cloud Pibroch. Huge congratulations to him and to Hamish Whyte of Mariscat Press — himself a poet. I confess I haven’t read Jim’s pamphlet yet, but to judge from the last time I heard him
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This year’s Edwin Morgan poetry competition was launched last week. With a first prize of £5,000 and others of £1,000, £500 and £50 (x 2), it’s one of the richest poetry prizes in Britain, but the kudos of being thus associated with Morgan’s name would itself be a high reward in my book. And, of
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The World Book Night event at St John’s on Saturday didn’t go quite as planned. David’s books hadn’t arrived on time. Instead, he had two boxes of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights — somewhat ironically, given Pullman’s views on religion — and one of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Still, with
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The entire poetry world is saddened to hear of Edwin Morgan’s death. I almost typed “the entire Scottish poetry world”, but Eddie Morgan was a true Scottish internationalist and his reach was global. Even that doesn’t sum him up. Morgan himself comes closest in the title of his collection From Glasgow to Saturn: from the
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Rob Mackenzie has blogged about using personas and characters in his poetry. One of the points he discusses is the degree to which a reader is likely to equate the I of a poem written in the first person with the writer. Anyone who writes in a persona — anyone who writes, I suspect —
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It’s a good season for poetry on Radio 3. The Essay last week was deeply under the influence: five contemporary poets each on a poet who influenced them. I’d recommend in particular Michael Symmons Roberts on David Jones; WN Herbert on Edwin Morgan (don’t ask me what the picture of Eilean Donan castle is about!);
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Somehow, I had missed until the middle of this week the news that Edwin Morgan has won this year’s Sundial Scottish Arts Council book of the year award for A Book of Lives. Shame on me! Not having read the collection–or any of the other finalists, for that matter–I can’t comment on its merits, but
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I know this is a bit behind the times, but there’s an interesting post on “official verse culture” over at Eyewear, on the back of the result of the TS Eliot Prize. One wonders whether Edwin Morgan–one of those whom Todd Swift and other bloggers (well, Rob Mackenzie at least) hoped would win those laurels–didn’t
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If you’ve been following my and Rob A Mackenzie‘s posts about our manuscript swap, you’ll probably be waiting for the more detailed comments I promised on Rob’s poems*, so here they finally are. There’s a lot of very good stuff in Rob’s MS, with a few really fine poems. Think of Rob A Mackenzie, and
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As you’ll know if you’re a regular visitor to these virtual parts, Rob A Mackenzie and I swapped manuscripts nearly a fortnight ago. I’ve had a read-through of Rob’s MS and will comment properly on it in due course, but suffice to say for the moment that it’s very good and a lot of fun
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I want to respond in more detail to a couple of the comments on my post about the first part of Yang-May Ooi‘s interview with Rob Mackenzie (the second part of which is now available). Ms Baroque (aka Katy Evans–Bush) commented: “the idea of nationalist poetry sounds disturbingly stalinist these days.” Three things bother me
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Rob Mackenzie has gone and got himself interviewed by Yang-May Ooi of FusionView. Part 1 of the piece is here. I was intrigued by the two following questions and answers: Is being Scottish a strong part of your identity? What does being Scottish mean to you? I’m not particularly nationalistic, until someone criticises Scotland. I
Amy Jo Philip 