Edwin Morgan's original Selected Poems was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a new Collected and several volumes since then. The millenium New Selected brings readers up to date.
It contains most of the 1985 volume, to which Morgan adds later poems. The complete sequence of Sonnets from Scotland appears in book form for the first time, gaining in relevance now that Scotland's Parliament is established. Hitherto uncollected too is the ambitious and magnificent Planet Wave, a suite of ten poems covering the history of the earth from the Big Bang to the time of Copernicus. It was set to music by the jazz saxophonist and composer Tommy Smith.
Morgan is unique in the courage of his experiments, his openness to the poetries of other languages and to science and science fiction. However spectacular his leaps in time and space, he always comes back to ground in Scotland, in Glasgow, in a present tense which he inhabits with exuberance and hope, and without cultural regrets.