David Kinloch

Love and a Life: 50 Poems by Edwin Morgan (Mariscat Press, 2003)

Most critical essays on Edwin Morgan begin with a survey of the diverse nature of his work. He is 'sonneteer', 'elegist', 'translator', 'playwright', ingenious discoverer and perpetrator of concrete and science fiction poems. Is there then a key to what Stuart Kelly has called the 'mysteries of Morganism' (Poetry Review, 92, 2)? Some years ago, Christopher Whyte suggested that it lay 'in the special status of his love poetry' and one might well argue that the multiple voices and styles adopted by Morgan are, in part, strategies of indirection forced out of him by the need to be circumspect about his homosexuality. Whyte's important essay developed two equally significant interviews he conducted with him in 1990 during the course of which Morgan spoke in detail about his life as a gay man and explicitly acknowledged the importance to his poetry of the 60s of the 'link' between sexuality and creativity.

Love and a Life confirms the central place sexual and emotional relationships have played in Morgan's life and suggests their importance to his poetry. 'Love', he writes, 'fills us and fuels us and fires us to create'. It is 'a probe' that galvanises us to explore a universe whose inexhaustible multiplicity is difficult to name, although with typical urgency Morgan tries: 'the shoals the voids the belts the / zones the drags the flares it signals all to / leave all and to navigate.' ('Love') This poem, then, signals something of the collection's ambition. Although focused on the personal it takes the odd, humourous jaunt back into prehistory ('Jurassic'), out into Nature ('Crocodiles') and revisits the passions of famous literary lovers such as Onegin's Tatyana, St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, Titania and Bottom.

It begins, however, with a list of names: 'Frank, Jean, Cosgrove, John, Malcolm, Mark - loves / of sixty years' and Morgan was clear in an interview with Phil Miller for The Herald (19/5/03) that it is the explicitly personal nature of the verse that is it's distinguishing feature and yet another fresh departure for him as a poet: 'In the past I couldn't name people. There were penalties for it in the past. It's a new kind of poetry for me'. Such novelty demands a new form, or rather one which in its deliberate mixture of prosiness and song-like cadence seems to echo traditional, familiar patterns the poet has employed elsewhere. First used briefly in the recent Cathures (Carcanet, 2002) each of the poems presents between fifteen and seventeen lines that depend strongly for their effect on the type of alliterative linkage much favoured by Morgan since his earliest days as a translator of Beowulf and hammer away on one rhyme in Skeltonic fashion until near the end when a short, sometimes jaunty, couplet varies the music before returning us to the dominant rime riche of the final line. It is a form suited perhaps both to the insistent, nagging, involuntary return of the poet's memories as well as to his vigorous attempts to remember past loves and celebrate present ones.

The collection is given the coherence of a sequence, however, not simply by a shared form and theme but by the way Morgan allows the start of one poem to recall the close of the previous one, focusing sometimes on a specific word which is then redeployed in a different context. The effect is one of overlap, of one memory sparking another. The difficulty with this technique is that it can become predictable. Once it has been noticed you start to look out for it and the echo can sometimes seem forced. This echo effect works best here when it returns, unexpectedly, after a span of poems. Some of the pleasure of reading 'Titania' -one of the strongest poems in the collection- comes from the way it implicitly picks up on the closing lines of the very first poem, 'Those and These', where Morgan evokes his various friends and lovers crowding around him 'pinning me, pulling my ears'. Similarly, it is the attention to microlinguistic effects of great subtlety as well as to the pacing of individual lines that impresses most. Here is the second half of 'Freeze-Frame' which presents the collection as a whole as a series of photographic stills:

When my head was on your knees
And your hand was on my head, did you think time would
             seize
    Head, hand, all, lock all away where there is no ring
            of keys
                    I did not, oh I did not,
                    But look what I have got,
  Frame of a moment made for friendless friendly time
            to freeze.

The slow tenderness of the gesture itself and its simultaneous existence as mere memory are perfectly acknowledged and rendered by unobtrusive repetition and the careful spacing of alliterative effects. And it is precisely because of the care accorded to the positions of 'head' and 'hand' in these lines that the repetition of the word 'all' and the use of the exclamatory 'oh'which might otherwise read too rhetorically are so beautiful and moving. The sequence of fricatives then deftly bears the poem off into the ether of memory, the sound satisfyingly confirming the ambiguities of its final line.

Similarly, 'Late Day', which takes as its theme the commonplace of a gloomy winter day in Glasgow derives only some of its pathos from our knowledge that the writer is old and suffering from cancer ('Scan Day'). Far more significant to the poem's success is the finely judged repetition of key words and the masterly way in which he allows internal rhyme to soften the expected blows of the end rhymes. Here is the second half of the poem:


    If darkness kept the world like a closed eye, we
could only get our nightmare to search and gaze
From its rolling red and bridled eyeball as we
           ride it down and down where muzzles never graze.
How great the winter sun
When horrors are undone
    By gentlest flimsiest fingers lighting our fingers
as we open the curtains on a day content to
             glimmer and not to blaze.


The last three lines are delicate tact incarnate, their movement exactly replicating the hesitant motion of fingers at curtains, at once apprehensive yet accepting of the slight grace conferred by winter sun.

The part of this sequence that works best is comprised of the poems that deal with the poet's cancer ('Scan Day', 'Skeleton Day'), through to the lovely evocations of 'Titania' and out into the four poems 'Tatyana', 'Teresa', 'John (1)' and 'John (2)'. 'Skeleton Day' moves not simply because of its rueful picture of 'the benedictions of the bone scan' but because Morgan allows memories and images from earlier poems in the sequence to flood the final lines in a quite unexpected way. 'Skull, ribs, hips emerge / from the dark like a caravan / Bound for who knows where' and in those words we glimpse again fragments of Morgan's wartime service in the desert. This poem ends with an image of a frail but determined body 'Still of a piece and still en route, beating / out the music of tongs and bones while / it can'. A few poems later those 'bones and tongs' return but now humourously, gently transformed into the music Bottom hears as he woos Titania.

'Titania' is a significant poem in Morgan's oeuvre in general because of the question it poses half way through. Ostensibly a question about Titania's and Bottom's ridiculous relationship it may also be asked of the collection as a whole and how it stands in relation to all Morgan's previous love poetry: 'So why is it touching?' In response, and with a critic's coldest eye, one might ask 'Yes. But is it sufficiently touching?' This is a question Christopher Whyte asked of Morgan's post-1990 love poetry which he does not find as persuasive as the beleaguered, censored work of the 60s and 70s, work which he reads with an acute and sympathetic eye. Because Morgan can now speak openly his love poetry is 'less transgressive' except when he returns to 'the backcourts and dim woodlands' ('Persuasion', Hold Hands among the Atoms, Mariscat, 1991) of furtive encounters. Whyte's argument essentially develops points first made by Morgan himself in his interviews with Whyte, significantly entitled 'Power from things not declared'. 'Creative activity of any kind', he remarked, 'is not hindered by pressures and difficulties and tensions'. If Whyte and the younger Morgan are correct then where does this leave the frank and joyful poems of Love and a Life? Morgan is too good and too experienced a poet not to have asked himself this question. Indeed he can be heard doing so in 'Persuasion' where the answer he gives suggests that if 'intelligence' and 'faith' are sufficient then not only a happier life but good poetry should still be possible.

Nevertheless, there are moments in this collection when one gets the impression that Morgan feels such questions may be a little beside the point or simply not important enough. Some of the poems sound as if they have been written quickly in the first flush of enthusiasm for a new love. There is awkwardness of which Morgan is surely aware and yet he has been content to leave it as it is because this collection is as much a testament to a life lived, to life and love in the process of living and loving, as it is a considered collection of verse. At least as worthy of consideration and attention as the 'power' and 'tension' of earlier lyrics is the 'affection' ('Titania', 'Harry') plainly and honestly celebrated in these poems. The aesthetic is quite different and reminds one of American examples such as O'Hara and Schuyler. And yet Morgan remains more astute even than his best critics. For surely his poem 'G' ingeniously dramatises the critical argument outlined above. Here is the furtive scene of tension: a married man speaking in broad Glaswegian, the vivid, transgressive detail of a blow-job. But then that scene is suspended as the withheld kiss is finally planted on the writer's lips 'at Central Station', 'in broad daylight':

It will not be denied
In this life. It is a flood-tide
You may damn with all your language but it breaks
            and bullers through and blatters all platitudes
and protestations before it, clean out of sight.

Is the kiss sexual, affectionate, both simultaneously? Is the rhetorical, triumphant close less powerful than the dramatic opening? There will be no shortage of readers, critics and fans, maybe even the odd poet or two, eager to answer these questions.



Notes

Books and articles referred to above

Stuart Kelly, 'The Mysteries of Morganism, Poetry Review 92
Christopher Whyte, 'Now you see it, now you don't': The Love Poetry of Edwin Morgan', The Glasgow Review, issue 2, 1994
'Power from things not declared' in Edwin Morgan, Nothing Not Giving Messages: reflections on his life and work, edited by Hamish Whyte, Polygon, 1990 ISBN 0 7486 6077 1
Edwin Morgan, Hold Hands Among The Atoms, Mariscat, 1991 ISBN 0946588 14 7


First published Poetry Review vol.93, no.3