Cathures

Meigling on the road tae Glesca
Edwin Morgan shows how his home city inhabits him to an extent unmatched by any other urban poet in his new collection, Cathures
James Campbell
Saturday January 18, 2003
The Guardian
Cathures
by Edwin Morgan
118pp, Carcanet, £6.95
One Saturday night in Glasgow in the 1970s, after the pubs had spilled out, I climbed on a bus to find the top deck swept up in a raucous sing-song, everything from "Ah belang tae Glesca" to "Bye Bye Blackbird" - the old Harry Lauder-Frank Sinatra repertoire. There was nothing unusual about it, except that in the middle of it all sat Edwin Morgan, hands clasped on his lap, silent and smiling, absorbing the city throb.
In 1999, Morgan was made Glasgow's Poet Laureate - an appointment that simply certified the role he has played for half a century as the city's unofficial laureate. It is a characteristic of the preeminent Scottish poets of the recent past - Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith and others - that they have addressed themselves to particular landscapes. Places and people, more than private inner space, have laid out the range of their subject matter. Garioch and MacCaig were city poets (part-time, in the latter's case) but only Morgan could be described as urban. He lives in Glasgow, and his city inhabits him in a way not comparable to any modern English or Irish poet.
Perhaps as a result, some of his poetry has a journalistic feel, as if peeled directly from the notebook. But the poem-as-observation is only one of numerous modes at Morgan's command. The upper deck of a Saturday-night bus is as much music to his ears as "the whisper of the grass" in a poem about a furtive homosexual rendezvous, or the slap of the "great sick Clyde shiver[ing] in its bed", or the rustle of the ghosts of John Knox and other iconic figures as they appear to the poet (again in the bushes with "my love") in the audacious early poem "The Vision of Cathkin Braes" (1952).
Morgan is not only a poet of Glasgow, but of all Scotland, and beyond. He has written computer poems, concrete poems, poems from Mercury, Saturn and the Moon, and even poems in the voices of other writers, such as the "Unpublished Poems by Creeley". The body of his work branches outwards by way of a linguistic ingenuity that at times can only be described as eccentric: "Canedolia", for example, uses Scottish place names to create "an off-concrete fantasia":
who saw?
rhu saw rum. garve saw
smoo. nigg saw tain.
lairg saw lagg. rigg saw
eigg. largs saw haggs.
tongue saw luss...
how far?
from largo to lunga from
joppa to skibo from
ratho to shona from
ulva to minto from
tinto to tolsta . . .
what do you do?
we foindle and fungle, we
bonkle and meigle and
maxpoffle..."
One of the genuinely popular poems to emerge from the era of poetry readings is "The Loch Ness Monster's Song", a unique case of giving voice to the voiceless. Morgan is a superb performer of his own work, not least of his playful poems, and should the real monster ever surface, its song will struggle to be heard above the already recorded noises, from "Sssnnwhuffffll?" to "blm plm/blm plm/blm plm/ blp".
To read Morgan's Collected Poems (1990) is occasionally to have the feeling of being trapped inside a wordprocessor. The letters scatter across the page like confetti, or else a huge "C.? WA! K?" occupies the whole of it ("Forgetful Duck"). He has translated profusely from the Russian, Hungarian and Italian, among other languages, and a new edition of his somewhat formal version of Beowulf has just been published by Carcanet (£6.95), its first appearance in Britain since 1952. Those who wish to compare it with more recent assaults on the Anglo-Saxon will be aided by a typically expert introductory essay on "The Translator's Task".
For all his virtuosity among different vocal instruments, however, Morgan is at his best when speaking in what one assumes to be his most natural register, a blend of cultivated English lyricism and mild Glasgow demotic. His strongest collection in this respect was The Second Life (1968), which contains the wonderful "Glasgow Green", a meditation on the legitimacy of what was then illicit love (Morgan came out as gay at the age of 70, in 1990), and the lovely "Trio", in which the poet passes three youngsters on a Glasgow street at Christmas, the boy with a guitar, one of the girls holding a "very young baby", and the other a little dog:
Orphean sprig! Melting
baby! Warm chihuahua!
The vale of tears is
powerless before you.
Whether Christ is born or is
not born, you
put paid to fate...
Monsters of the year
go blank, are scattered back,
can't bear this march of
three.
The power of youth, or love, or a positive outlook, to withstand the darker force is a theme dear to Morgan, and is taken up in his new collection. Cathures , we are assured, is an early name for Glasgow. In one poem a boy approaches the poet as he is being interviewed in the street:
A youth attached himself.
"Radio 1?"
"Radio 3." "Whit band's that
oan?"
"Ninety to ninety-two." "Ur
you a Sir?" "No, I'm a poet." "Great, see
ye la'er!"
He gave a thumbs-up,
darted away. He would turn night into
day,
that one.
Here, the conclusion sits more facilely on the anecdote than with the earlier "Trio", and the same feeling attaches to a number of the poems in Cathures . Many were written for occasions, and you can practically hear the murmur of amused approval that often follows the last line of a poem at public readings. Morgan has demonstrated that he can move a poem in whatever direction he wants to, which makes you wonder why he chooses to dally so frequently in this collection with doggerel:
Is isn't singing in
the rain
But here it's skatin in the
rain
It isn't Kelly or Astaire
But we've a dancer in
George Square
It is an odd feature of this book that such material, stimulated by the obligations of laureateship, should sit next to a poem like "Gull", the first in a series of introspective poems inspired, it seems, by the revelation of a serious illness:
A seagull stood on my
window ledge today...
There was not a fish
in the house - only me.
Did he smell my flesh, that
white one?
The poems that follow make up the best set, in a book composed of groups of poems. Some were written to accompany music ("Up and down the rickety stair / Take your partners for Burke and Hare") and take on the leftover appearance that lyrics often do when required to stand alone on the page.
While Cathures contains a number of fine poems, readers new to Morgan would get more of his linguistic circus from the New Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 2000. It is good, however, to be reminded of a line from Wittgenstein's Tractatus , first used in a computer poem in the 1970s and reprised here, which could stand equally above the entrance to the city of Glasgow and as a motto for the work of Edwin Morgan: "The world is everything that is the case."
· James Campbell is a former editor of the Edinburgh Review.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
London Review of Books
In a collection that takes its title from an old name of Glasgow, Edwin Morgan, Glasgow's Poet Laureate, celebrates his native city with undiminished wit and vigour:
I, Morgan, whom the Romans call Pelagius,
Am back in my own place, my Green Cathures
...And my cheek still burns for the world.
William Wootten, The London Review of Books:
The two slightly Tennysonian dramatic monologues that begin Cathures can be read as disguised imaginative autobiographies. In the first, 'Pelagius', the fourth-century British heretic and enemy of St Augustine articulates a determination, in spite of all his failures and enemies, to work for a brighter, less superstitious future, concluding: 'It is for the unborn, to accomplish their will/With amazing, but only human, grace.' This is one Morgan, the singer of hymns to a bright humanism and a brighter future. In 'Merlin', both speaker and meaning are more hermetic. Merlin declares: 'Battles end, and surgeons come, and ravens./A horn blew truce, but nothing would console me.' And so, for a time, Merlin becomes a maddened solitary, so much in the company of a wolf that he too is made wolfish. Morgan can never decide whether he belongs alone in the fen or with the lutanist in the hall.