Wow! eBook
A Book of Lives First Edition
Author(s): Edwin Morgan (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 22 Feb. 2007
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 105 pages
- ISBN-10: 185754918X
- ISBN-13: 9781857549188
Book Description
No wonder Edwin Morgan is Scotland’s best-loved poet. His poems teem with lives and loves and are marked by an unusual love of the present and the future. He finds forms for themes and ideas just out of reach. In his latest collection poems both profound and witty are to be found: occasional verse that transcends its occasion, explorations of the human condition conducted with a virtuosic lightness of touch. “A Book of Lives” draws together the themes that inform his poetic world. The largest vistas of human history, from twenty billion years BC to 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’; Scotland from Bannockburn to the opening of the Scottish parliament; portraits – of Rimbaud, the emperor Hirohito, Raeburn’s skating Reverend Walker…Poems for birthdays and elegies celebrate friends; a dramatic dialogue about cancer sets personal experience in a wry evolutionary context. At the heart of the collection, a major sequence, “Love and a Life”, affirms the inextinguishable energies of love and art.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Morgan is not only a poet of Glasgow, but of all Scotland, and beyond. Now in his eighties, Morgan is the most influential Scottish poet since Hugh MacDiarmid.” —London Review of Books
About the Author
Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was born in Glasgow. He served with the RAMC in the Middle East during World War II. He became lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, where he had studied, and retired as titular Professor in 1980. He was Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate and from 2004 until 2010 served as Scotland’s first Makar, or National Poet. He was made an OBE in 1982 and received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000. A Book of Lives First Edition (2007) won the Scottish Arts Council Sundial Book of the Year. Carcanet has published most of his work, including his Collected Poems, Collected Translations, plays such as A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus Christ and The Play of Gilgamesh and his translations of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Racine’s Phaedra. The Edwin Morgan Trust and partners will be celebrating Edwin Morgan’s 100th year in 2020 – 2021.Commencing on Edwin Morgan’s birthday, April 27, 2020 and continuing until April 2021. For more information on #edwinmorgan100, of their biannual Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Translation Exchanges please visit their website.
