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A Home in Space | Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry | Edwin Morgan, edited by Greg Thomas and Julie Johnstone (Reaktion Books)

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This is an expansive, informed, enthusiastic and wonderfully illustrated book of Edwin Morgan’s extensive array of concrete, visual and sound poetry. Edited by the writer, critic, poet and artist Greg Thomas and the artist, curator, editor and publisher Julie Johnstone, both are based in Scotland, respectively Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In Thomas’ Introduction he tells us of Morgan’s six decades as a writer/artist, starting as a lyric poet whilst ‘simultaneously creating Surrealist-influenced scrapbooks of collaged word and image’, going on to explore in rich detail the trajectory and depths of this. I like the summation on the meaning of this breadth as ‘a kind of egalitarian curiosity of play’.

A further elaboration is proclaimed by how both editors believe Morgan was ‘a poet for whom trust in poetic instinct and thrillingly technical experiment were mutually dependent forces, locked in a fruitful push and pull’. This culminates in a concluding abstract that ‘Morgan was a poet, first and foremost, and his meaningful legacy is in poetry and its intersections with other art forms’.

The enthusiasm, delight and certainties in these expressions set the reader up for an expansive content to follow, especially the abundant illustration of this phenomenal range of work. It is contained in the following seven chapters/sections, beginning with full colour excepts from Morgan’s Scrapbooks. My favourite is chapter 2 Verbivocovisual: Concrete Poetry in the 1960s with background information on Morgan’s introduction to this literary form.

In posting this review today (it has previously appeared in International Times) I wanted to suggest this book would make a wonderful Christmas present, being so visual but also substantive, and I say this NOT as someone usually inclined to mention the festive present syndrome so early… Having done so, however, here is the perfect concrete poem from its section, and one of Morgan’s most familiar/popular,

It was especially interesting for me to read ‘We have made the vexed but careful decision to present Morgan’s concrete poems in this chapter in their original typescripts’ because I am delighted they did. This isn’t a purist’s response but one that acknowledges and enjoys the authenticity of doing so because there is the physical endeavour to see in those typed, shaped and patterned poems made fulsomely apparent across 41 pages.

Seeing Orgy (April 1964) in its original typed print is personally delightful – a poem not easy to find online, and copies that do exist are usually a newly typeset presentation which misses out on the perfect grid of its construction. A favourite of mine, I memorised and recited the poem to many classes of students over years of presenting concrete poetry: its propulsive rhythm being aurally dramatic, and of course there was the title to tease them into its remarkable narrative, this itself cleverly teased out of the constraints of that grid. It is important to see as that original and in the context of others presented here in their various shapes, forms and, of course, mimetic patterns as the essence of being visually ‘concrete’.

This copious, chronological illustration of the poems continues and works through individual booklets and/or poems conveying such impressive variety in Morgan’s visual interests and outputs, beautifully focused on and presented in chapter 6 Rainbows in Concrete: Cursive and Colour Poems ‘which gathers together various of Morgan’s publications and exhibition materials characterized by their striking use of handwritten, felt-tipped lines of text: not only by colour, but also by the literal evidence of the author’s hands’. Here again, as in the bulk of this book, there are printed illustrations of the original work.

The closing chapter 7 Second Lives ‘gathers together some of the most interesting late forays into concrete, visual and sound poetry, as well as related forms of experiment’, further celebrating Morgan’s active and lifelong commitment to poetic investigation and production.

Greg Thomas and Julie Johnstone have, with fine production from Reaktion Books, given us a superb document of Morgan’s creative legacy.

NB. Read my review of Carcanet’s Centenary Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan (and more on ‘Orgy’…) here

 

 

‘Forgetfulness’ by Ian Seed – Shearsman Books

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This is Ian Seed’s eighth collection with Shearsman Books, a distinctive writing journey of mainly prose poems. Forgetfulness is, importantly, an eclectic offering reflecting a varied crafting arc in his overall poetic framing of familiar themes like alienation, uncertainty and surprise, sustaining the genuine joy in reading these signature explorations.

This book presents its variables across four sections. In the title prose poem, we encounter the ghost of Seed’s mother who has already visited in poems preceding this in the opening section.

Although it finishes with the line

Deep down we both know she’s no longer alive, but neither of us can bring ourselves to say so 

we already know of her death which has been brought palpably back to life/our notice – not being flippant – in the first of eight sequences from ‘Scattering My Mother’s Ashes’*, this through the conversations she has with her son or other narrator observations like

‘What’s the point of writing in that silly way?’ my mother wants to know  (1)

At the next stop, the door at the back opened, and stayed open even when we set off. The driver must have forgotten to close it. I had to hold my mother tight when we went around a corner  (2)   

and in the surreal convolution (in its context) of the following, referring to his father

I though he’d died, though I’d heard more recently that he hadn’t, just been very ill and was now recovered. In fact, he looked quite young, being much slimmer than when I’d last seen him. Perhaps we could be friends again now that my mother was no longer alive  (8)

Other poems in this section create further moments of encounter/alienation for Seed, for example in (3), when arriving in Milan, a poet who is supposed to be meeting him doesn’t turn up, but a mysterious former student may have appeared; and in (7), seeking assurances about the meaning of his life a year on from my mother’s death, and turning to a Christian helpline, there seems to be a positive conclusion to his yearning, though doubt is still suggested in the line

I felt that within the granted minutes I had infinite time, because love was infinite, and all I had to do was accept it

The second section begins with a poem ‘The Jugglers’, perhaps a metaphor for the storytelling that will follow in other poems, but also more broadly (predictably, as interpretation?) for the lives we think we lead and think we have led: from dreams to hopeful/desperate imagining of having happened. It is both lyrical and philosophical, from

5

Fingertips reach the tender side
beyond mere greeting and passing away.
This breath on my face, on my trembling
shoulder blades, the small part of me
which is still open, left open from the wound,
the only place you can enter

 to

10

The road is made of stones and stories. It merges
with the light ahead. It has mapped
our dreams. How long shall we linger
on its verge, nursing our cut feet, gazing
with affection at old scars?

The narratives of following poems is in the searching of self, strangers, other people in their stories and stories observing them. There are also explicit references to this focus

In the unwrinkled pages of the story
(‘Transfigure’)

…where every piece
of the story would fit
(‘Tenants’)

…the story
told just for the darkness
(‘Wakening’)

The third section is predominantly a collection of prose poems, wonderfully familiar in their sifting through uncertainty and the surreal manifestations of this.

The fourth and final section is work mainly from a previous list poem collection ‘I Remember’ (Red Ceilings Press). My review of this can be found here: https://gravyfromthegazebo.blog/2021/06/10/i-remember-by-ian-seed-the-red-ceilings-press/

The reminiscence in the first list poem is an affecting and candid addition to those recalls and reconstructions that open this fine collection.

For further details and to purchase, go here: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Ian-Seed-Forgetfulness-p767454180

* (a Red Ceilings limited-edition pamphlet)