Centenary Publications

Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the best-loved and most significant poets of the twentieth century. 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 stanzas – together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

Edited by Hamish Whyte.

Available now on the Carcanet website and from all good retailers.

To mark the centenary, Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Limited, is repatriating Edwin Morgan back to Scotland where he is to be published again, in association with Carcanet. Morgan was at once a prolific and eclectic writer, whose themes were as diverse as love and science fiction. And to celebrate the diversity of such a loved poet we are publishing five individual, thematically arranged, selected poems.

Each book contains twenty poems, works on: love; Scotland; people and places; animals; and space. These volumes are introduced by popular names: Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Ali Smith and Michael Rosen. This box set is sure to be popular with fans of his works and collectors.

A limited edition box set with 5 books containing 20 selected poems. Available to order now on the Birlinn website

Speculative Books are proud to announce ‘The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection’ guest-edited by Colin Herd. Before he published his first collection of poetry, Edwin Morgan made a series of visually arresting, playful, dynamic scrapbooks.

A queer visual diary, a catalogue of images, and a surreal bricolage, the scrapbooks were a resource and a testing ground as Morgan developed his distinctively experimental and anti-orthodox poetics.

‘The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection’ is filled with poetry and short fiction inspired by Edwin Morgan’s scrap books which he donated to Glasgow University Library.

Featuring new work from 60 writers responding to Edwin Morgan, The Centenary Collection is available online here.

Getting in touch with language daily, Morgan accumulated a huge amount of prose.

Writing prose, his creative intelligence appears to delight in its variety of stance and topic, and even to seek out assignments that offered such possibilities. Morgan’s writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow.

Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language is a celebration of the poet’s wit, insight, and erudition, and holds surprises and delights for everyone. An interview with editors, John Coyle and James McGonigal can be read here.

Available now on the ASLS website.

Hamish Whyte was an aspiring librarian and bibliographer when he met one of his poet-heroes, Edwin Morgan. He soon became (through Mariscat Press) one of Morgan’s publishers, and finally — and most importantly ­— a close friend. The connection was life-changing. 

In the year of the centenary, Morgan & Me shares the detail of an unforgettable friendship, drawing on Whyte’s own archive of postcards, notes and photographs. Only a poet-publisher could cover such a range: the nitty-gritty of the editing process, the book-design discussion, the ‘absinthe-with-Eddie’ sessions, the innumerable lunches, the septuagenarian falling in love, the cancer years, the sorrows and the joys. It is a movingly personal account, recreating the context in which some of Morgan’s greatest poems came into being.

Available from the HappenStance website, Amazon and some independent bookshops.

In order to celebrate the centenary of Edwin Morgan, the anthology ÚLTIMA MENSAGEM (LAST MESSAGE) presents one hundred poems selected from the books he published (1952-2010), showing a diverse and multifaceted path. The selection of the poems is by João Concha (publisher) and Ricardo Marques (translator), also seeking to cover links to specific aspects of Portuguese culture. Morgan started publishing relatively late and his work blossomed in the midst of an experimental revolution, so the selection and establishment of a corpus was a particularly arduous task, especially if we take into account the number of pamphlets and brochures in which he collaborated and the respective dating.

Selected by João Concha and Ricardo Marques. Translation by Ricardo Marques /// book requests via nao.edicoes@gmail.com.