Edwin Morgan is best remembered as Scotland’s foremost national poet, a bold, lyric voice who shaped conversations around queerness, politics and post-war life. But Morgan was also a restless experimenter working far beyond traditional verse. This book brings together, for the first time, the full range of his visual and sound poetry – from vibrant poster poems and surrealist collages to concrete poetry, cut-ups and poem-sculptures. It reveals Morgan as a major figure in twentieth-century ...

Containing poems written by Edwin Morgan during the past six years, this collection looks at human life from a variety of perspectives, encompassing a range of themes, the foremost of which is history. This new work displays the author's characteristic willingness to experiment with a variety of subjects, from the history of cancer to the new Scottish parliament.

This collection of lyric epiphanies reveals the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily relocation of words in concrete poems, and the weird rhythms of sound poems. The poet's 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. This volume includes Poems of Thirty Years, Themes on a Variation, and some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

One of the central figures of 20th-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships, and his creative collaborations. At the same ti...

This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanz...

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEADThis book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision.MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poem...

In this haunting poem from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Scots-born writer James Thomson anticipated the modern age's nightmare vision of the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair. In contrast to the late Victorian confidence all around him, Thomson dared to face the possibility that the universe was utterly indifferent to human affairs. The strange and dark images in The City of Dreadful Night have become a landmark of modern literature, for...

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and...

‘Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world’ Jeanette Winterson, Guardian‘Wonderful . . . a poet alert to every sound and shape of language’ Sunday TelegraphThe Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.Woven and weaving...

The title poem from this collection is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with 'the growth of a poet's mind'. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney.'Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gift...

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise. Her first book, Almana, was a traveller's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. Nigh-No-Place is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world.Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across Canada, hungry for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of ...

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that...