 Welcome to this celebration of Edwin Morgan's poetry and what would have been his hundredth year. My name is Richard Price and I'm the head of contemporary British collections at the British Library and I'm also a poet and I knew Eddie as many would come to know him for many years. He was a friend and an unofficial mentor and though he died nearly a decade ago now he is still speaking to me through his poems and his letters and the conversations that we had. The breadth in subject and form of Morgan's poetry is unusual in anglophone literature of any period. There's no one like him for mastering and transforming new and old forms and making sure that content, the meaning is addressing the most urgent of concerns, how to build a better society, how to actively dream into a better future and how to love. He's a lyric poet of tenderness, a playful poet of teasing language and a prophet for an equal society. I suppose his breakthrough collection The Second Life published in 1968 is the best place to start historically but the recent centenary selected is the way to go to sample his whole career including his transformation of sonnet opening it out to middle and longer distance views not just the claustrophobic rooms it had often moped about him until then. Like so many of his later collections The Second Life has a restless command of form and a variety of content no other poet of his era could reach. Its surprises offer challenges and delights the concrete poem written in 1964 denouncing apartheid the cherished lyric strawberries as delicate and passionate as the Persian poetry he loved and the thoughtful and remarkably quick response poems which address contemporary culture and society. This is a book where you'll find elegies for the death of Marilyn Monroe or an East End gangster or an escaped wolf. It's that kind of range. It's a book playfully celebrating the computer's first Christmas card. It's a book fiercely imagining space travel and regaining identity by losing it and subtly retwisting it as it reemerges. Tonight you'll hear from a selection of poets who respond to the extraordinary engagedness of Edwin Morgan's work. I've chosen writers who are not just considerable poets but who also take poetry to other places in drama, performance, music, translation, publishing, visual art, the poetic essay and the digital world. As you will see they bring out many of the deaths in Edwin Morgan's work and they respond particularly sensitively to his work with their own work. Because I wanted to show the way that Morgan's poetry goes beyond Scotland, I've chosen Scottish writers certainly but also poets who are outside of that tradition completely who have Irish, English, Ghanaian and Portuguese heritage. Morgan is nothing if not international. Now the title of the program, The New Davan, well it's taken from one of Morgan's other books and there'll be a poem from that collection a bit later on but I've also used it metaphorically. A Davan in Persian and now Iranian culture is a collection of poems, that's its meaning, but it also has other senses, a customs house, a government department, a gathering of advisors. Tonight I wanted to hybridise the idea of the Davan with the Scottish concept of the Kailey, not just a dance but a visit where people share their poems, their music, their songs and their news and of course there's another meaning of the Davan, the sofa and I've asked the contributors to sit on a metaphorical sofa and to choose a different Morgan poem, their favourite Morgan poem on that sofa and then to respond with a work by themselves that in some way speaks back to the poem they've chosen. Our first poet is Simon Barraclough, a writer who's published several volumes, most recently Sunspots in 2015. Now as well as publishing books of poetry he devises and performs in multimedia projects involving filmmakers and musicians, Psychopoetica, a riff on the Hitchcock film, The Debrie Field, concerned with the Titanic, Sunspots concerned with the Sun and Vatidunus, another recollection of the Hitchcock film and he's currently working on new work, new poems, stories, songs and films. Hi I'm going to read one of Evan Morgan's poems from a sequence of five poems called Five Poems on Film Directors and in my writing I write a lot about cinema, it's probably my first art form I really fell in love with from the age of four onwards. Before lockdown I would go to the cinema three or four times a week, it's quite normal for me and I'm going to read a poem that kind of responds to this Morgan poem of my own but it was written without any knowledge of this poem, you know I discovered this poem after I've written mine but I think of the two poems as kind of siblings, kind of like entangled particles to borrow from quantum mechanics. So the first poem I'm going to read, well the Morgan poem I'm going to read is called Antonioni and it's about the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni who's one of my very favourite directors. Antonioni, trees are drowning in salt, the keyhole whines, he's left his boats in the reed bed, her book and idiotic gloves where she threw them, beyond the canal the tankers prowl north to south, their call lingers across the marshes. Why did you wait till the summer was over before you came? Why did you wait for me if you'd rather have a boat than a woman? It wasn't that, it isn't that, I'm going, send back the car. With Sandro you're joking, it's cold. The silver car between the poplars like a fish in reeds, he lives on peppermints and blues or he is tearing photographs for a living or he has been sent death or open-egged or. So that's a poem that I think captures the essence of Antonioni's film style very well and this one's very philosophical, very abstract. To me he tells his story and he conveys emotions and feelings through composition and architecture and the things that people don't say, the things that they do say to each other are often a bland and vague and meaningless but there's a lot of kind of intellectual rigor going on beneath the dialogue around the dialogue and I think Morgan conjures that up very well especially with the kind of enigmatic ending of the awe and the awe and the awe. Lots of Antonioni films kind of end on an enigmatic scene in that way he kind of changed the way that stories are told in films, especially with L'Église, very radical ending to that. My poem is called Zabriskie Point which is the film that Antonioni made after Blow Up, Blow Up was his massive international hit, made him a household name across the world in cinematic circles and Zabriskie Point was his next American colour feature and it was an almighty flop who was panned universally, lost a lot of money but it happens to be a rather brilliant film I think and so I always wanted to write a poem about Zabriskie Point and what it meant to me and my poem is kind of about the the Tully actors Mark Frichette and Daria Halpin who were completely unknowns, unprofessionals and they got a lot of stick for that as did Antonioni and so I wrote this poem without knowing of the existence of the Morgan poem, I came across that much later but their kind of siblings they go together somehow across space and time so this is my poem is Zabriskie Point. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion yawns across Death Valley breathing winds of cash and crew for Michelangelo he leads his two unknown unknowns like cattle through the fences of his film leaves them frazzling on the dunes of Furnace Creek he came to look for America but finds the dismal desert of Milan and everything they make here will be panned for crap not gold the couple beautiful and blank will sweat beneath the TV lights pinatas for the practised brick bats of syndicated chat and sniffy critics damning them for not convincing us themselves and even after 40 years the online commentators sneer and revel in the early death of Mark Frichette who walked offset to meet the double of his unknown self and stepped into its silhouette. Thank you. Our next poet is Zifa Benson. Now Zifa is a multidisciplinary artist whose work intersects science, art, the body and ritual. Now she explores these themes through poetry, through theatre making, performance and through prose. She's performed her work internationally in many contexts. She's been an artist in residence at the Courtauld Institute of Art and as core artist in the BBC Africa Beyond's Cross-Arts Project Translations. She's currently a bridging Othello for the National Youth Theatre's upcoming production and is writing a commission play with the title Black Mozart, White Chevalier. The Edward Morgan poem I've chosen is Hyena and I chose it mainly because it reminds me of Africa and living in Africa and also because the poem I'm responding to it with is called Blues for Zara and it's going to be from my poetry collection which is about Salki Bartman, the hot and top Venus and she came from South Africa and Hyena's come from South Africa and because I'm in the middle of writing the collection I'm on the lookout for anything that inspires the poetic impulse. So when I saw Edward Morgan's poem Hyena it spoke to me in that way. Hyena, I am waiting for you. I have been traveling all morning through the bush and not eaten. I am lying at the edge of the bush on a dusty path that leads from the burnt out crown. I am panting. It is midday. I found no waterhole. I am very fierce without food and although my eyes are screwed to slits against the sun you must believe I am prepared to spring. What do you think of me? I have a rough coat like Africa. I am crafty with dark spots like the bush tufted plains of Africa. I sprawl as a shaggy bundle of gathered energy like Africa sprawling in its waters. I trot, I lope, I slaver. I am a ranger. I hunch my shoulders. I eat the dead. Do you like my song? When the moon pours hard and cold on the belt I sing and I am the slave of darkness. Over the stone walls and the mud walls and the ruined places and the owls the moonlight falls. I sniff a broken drum. I bristle. My pelt is silver. I howl my song to the moon up it goes. Would you meet me there in the waste places? It is said I am a good match for a dead lion. I put my muzzle at his golden flanks and tear. He is my golden supper but my tastes are easy. I have the crowd of fangs and I use them. Oh, and my tongue? Do you like me when it comes lolling out over my jaw very long and I am laughing? I am not laughing but I am not snarling either. Only panting in the sun showing you what I grip carrying with. I am waiting for the foot to slide, for the heart to seize, for the leaping sinews to go slack, for the fight to the death to be fought to the death, for a blazing eye and the rumour of blood. I am crouching in my dry shadows till you are ready for me. My place is to pick you clean and leave your bones to the wind. So this is my con called Blue's Fasara and the reason it responds to Edwin Morgan's hyena is because they both make me think of South Africa. They're both creatures or I should say ones of human being and ones of hyena from South Africa and they both have animals in them. This is Blue's Fasara. My keeper calls me ass centaur, claims a taste of the exotic is all I'm good for. Here's savoury dream-made flesh she tells the mob. See the natural scoop in her back? That's how you tell she is a monster. Seen bear, rump and cappuccine dance upon bear's back. Now I rear to fool you at first glance, a well endowed proposition, real flesh, no deception. I nub my feet to the thin cords of my mammal con. Stump, jump, bump, plump, rump. Leers and jeers always free-flowing as top-hatted men brush past me. Some are sweating. Have you seen anything so unspeakably hot and taut? Asked my keeper. I danced the black striped gal of an oryx to pull back the nears. The soil doves say I'm a tout's dream. Scientists avid to test the high yellow of my skin think I'm kin to succubus and fabled knuckle walker. When will my body have nothing more than its true coy-coy self to speak of? Months ago I rode in a barouche sent by a duke who sent my shape-scrolls like a cartouche. Now I languish in taverns, fairgrounds and roadside inns where trolls with their knees stink jostled to see this stuffed skin mark time in a floor show. A human with her own story to tell can dance even when her gods have blast into history and lose their grip on her world. Rainbows after a storm is their promise. They haven't this only as I grind in the dirt of being a woman. Nancy Campbell is a Scottish poet and a non-fiction writer whose books include The Library of Ice, Readings from a Cold Climate, Disco Bay, Navigations and How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic. Between 2010 and 2017 she undertook a series of residencies with Arctic museums. The point being to research cultural shifts and climate crisis in the north. More recently Nancy's worked on commissions closer to home as the UK Canal Laureate and as a Literature Fellow at Internationales, Kunsthause, Villa Concordia in Germany. Edwin Walton is one of my poetry heroes, a poet who's playful and passionate, political and queer, someone who can write in megaphonic large caps and also quiet lowcase, someone who writes beautiful love poems and also brilliant techno babble. I've loved his work for years but for this divan I decided to choose a poem I didn't know. Rather than one of the legendary computer Christmas cards I've chosen a more philosophical poem about winter to respond to. Winter. The year goes, the woods decay and after many a summer dies. The swan on Bingham's pond. The ghost comes and goes. It goes and ice appears. It holds. There's girls that stand around surprised blinking in the heavy light. There's boys when skates take over swan tracks gone. After many summer dies, the swan white ice glints only crystal beyond white. Even there's blues not there. The poets would find it. I find one stark scene cut by evening cries by warring air. The muffled hiss of blades escapes into breath, hangs with it a moment. Fades off. Fades off goes the scene. The voices fade. The line of trees. The woods that fall decay. And break. The dark comes down. The shouts run off into it and disappear. At last the lumps go to when folk drives monstrous down the dual carriageway out to the west. Leave it in my room and on this paper I do not know about that gray, dead pain of ice that sees nothing and that nothing sees. And although he doesn't mention this in any notes to the poem, I'm sure many of you will recognize that Morgan is riffing on some lines from Tennyson's poem, Tithonus, which I'll just read briefly now. The woods decay, the woods decay and form. The faith has weep for a berth under the ground. Man comes until the soil and lies beneath. And after many a summer dies, the swan. I read Tennyson as a teenager even before I encountered Morgan's work and read many poems by heart. So I was really thrilled to discover one poem varied within another quite secretly like something in the ice. And it seems to me to really encapsulate the way that poets talk to each other across time, part of a ladder of poem responses. But Morgan has something that isn't there in Tennyson's work, a lightness of tone despite the serious subject matter, which is the myth of Tithonus. Tithonus was the lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn in classical mythology. And in order that they would never be parted, she made him immortal. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth for him. So he lived on alongside her, but grew older and older and more and more decrepit. And his story is a very tragic one of great pain and suffering. And while I'm searching this myth for my own work, I discovered that Tennyson's is not the only Tithonus in poetry. Sappho had already written about him, and it's one of her longest fragments, number 58 in Anne Carson's translation, if not winter. So I chose to echo some Carson's words in my own poem in the way that Morgan reflects on Tennyson's. And these phrases are hair turned white after black, and the brilliance and beauty of the sun. Happy birthday, Edwin Morgan. Winter, and I see nothing. But where you fade out, I enter. Dear Eddie, how should I write back to you? The answer to your cold myth begins and ends with birds. At dawn, a pair of swans haunting the reeds where the little roboats moored, dipping their beaks, to water trickles down their shivering quills. A kingfisher, tiny blue revenant, the ever-invisible owl. Pick any bird, choose your auger, speak a spell, still the weather forecast surprises us. In the summer, we forget the weight of snowflakes and how the ice renews, and when the salting trucks come wheezing around the streets, scattering pink crystal on the cobbles, that frozen hangover cure. Who knows whether the long after party was worthwhile. Snow sinks into the Black River, the city neon flickers thinly on water, and soon combs slowly over the weir. What damage is done here in the dark? Stumbling, sliding under the stars. Each step, like bone in agony, an iceberg tilting silently, black hairs turning to white, a slip before a kiss. The ice renews itself each night, a minuscule blinking thing, growing out seven limbs from nothing but air and dust. Trap bubbles swim in opaque pools, reflecting phases of the moon. The wind burns round the eaves. It breathes as if about to speak. I'm listening. The snow is laced with sweetness, shot with rainbows. And I hang up on your words across this chill century. You leave me with the blues, just two magnets of cobalt, older minerals that pull apart together and wait all night for the brilliance and beauty of the sun. At dawn, a pair of swans still haunts the reeds. Jean Gonsha was born in Evra, Portugal, and lives in Lisbon. His work is in the visual arts, writing, and also in publishing. Since 2007, his work's been published regularly and shown in solo and group exhibitions. As an artist, he's illustrated more than 20 poetry books and children's books, receiving a gold medal in the 3x3 and picture book show in 2017. As a publisher, he's particularly interested in working with the connections between the written and visual forms of text. In 2013, he started now in addition, a small publishing house dedicated to poetry and based in Lisbon. The anthology Ultima Mensage in 2010, sorry in 2020, gathered 100 poems by Edwin Morgan, translated by Ricardo Marx. Jean's poems are written by a secret alter ego, taking the form of book objects. What does it mean? People sometimes wonder about the meaning of a text that doesn't necessarily tell a story, or that doesn't seem to express a sole idea. For me, as a reader, meaning is a much more complex process. Sometimes reading poetry can be about doubt, ambiguity, or playfulness. Also, for an artist, connections between different meanings through sound and visual signs are part of that non-literal meaning of a text that most interests me. It's about the experience of seeing it, hearing it, reading it, altogether or not. And that is the case of Morgan's concrete poetry. When asked to choose a poem from his vast universe, I immediately thought of French Persian cats having a ball, originally published in 1968. This is one of the poems I chose for a bilingual anthology to celebrate Morgan's centenary, published last February in Lisbon by Noé de Soigne. As a publisher, I've found it hard to select poems from such a diverse universe of almost 60 years of books. But some of the visual work had to be accounted. Poems such as French Persian cats can also be materials or things. In that sense, technology is not irrelevant. These cats were drawn by the author using a typewriter with its specific process, font type and spacings. A bit different from the modern digital layouts we use today, as in this anthology of 100 poems in Portuguese. It may be not a very difficult poem to translate, hence the meaning of words is not the most important in this case, but hard to recreate on the page not using a typewriter. This physical dimension of the text was something that I was more aware during the nonlinear process of translating it to a different visual medium, an in-design layout for a final printed page. Almost impossible to keep the spatial relations and the hierarchies between letters and build the form and the image of the poem. And the poem, this poem, is form taking place in a given page. About the reading and equally decisive, the sound. French Persian cats having a ball repeats and combines phonemes. Are these words or just sounds? Pieces of a musical puzzle? Cha as kept in French? The char of Persia? Or cha as the Cuban dance cha-cha-cha? Maybe just concrete cats having fun as the title promises. Probably Cheshire Cat would also like this poem. I bet he would join the ball. In the making of a poem, still a title of a Morgan's poem, and in the reading of a poem, image and sound can unite to express ideas or to play with an idea, including the idea of poetry itself. As a kind of dance, or the language itself as the ballroom of fun, a realm of multiplicities, our ball. Cha-cha-cha? Cha-cha-cha? Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born London-based poet and voiceover artist, and one half of the team behind Sidekick Books. Her work's been published by Salt and Happenstance, and it won the Live Cannon International Poetry Prize and has been thrown out of the helicopter. That's the point, not Kirsten. She's currently researching Japanese folklore for a sci-fi collaboration. Home in Space by Edwin Morgan. Laid back in orbit, they found their minds. They found their minds were very clean and clear. Clear crystals in swarms outside were their fireflies and larks. Larks they were in lift off, swallows in soaring. Soaring metal is flight and mess together. Together they must hatch. Hatches let the welders out. Out went the white suit rigours with frames as light as air. Air was millions under lock and key. Keyens had computers wild on Saturday nights. Nights, days, months, years they lived in space. Space shone black in their eyes. Eyes, hands, food tubes, screens, lenses, keys were one. One night, or day, or month, or year, they all gathered at the panel and agreed. Agreed to cut communication with the Earthbase. And it must be said they were cool and clear as they dismantled the station and gave their capsule such power that they launched themselves outwards, outwards in an impeccable trajectory. That band, that band of tranquil defiers, not to plant any home with roots, but to keep a voyaging generation voyaging. And as far as there would ever be a home in space, space that needs time and time that needs life. Belting, circa the Kuiper Belt, after a home in space by Edwin Morgan. Lying still in space is one thing, but to do so so as to let your crew mates arms swing up, up and down with any decent force, forces a body to get creative. Creative as the teams that built this can. Can we still be heard at ground control? Controlling the scope and strike is one thing. A thing is, when the leather bites my behind, behind the monitors they might worry. Worry the shrieks mean your space bats killing me. Me, the navigator, as if you'd be so, so stupid as to strand yourself. Or that that glance we shared as we buckled in in Houston had become a full on yes, yes, mission tanking marathon of banging. Banging my head on the bunk as I buck buck beneath the swish and crack. I feel the thick red reddening with every whack stripes rising rising like moons on the moons of my cheeks. Cheeks ablaze you break for air and peer peer sagely into the scammer. We are passing it now. Now it is passing us. This ring of methane ammonia water. Water? No, thank you. Onward past what? What might be described as a glorious glorious galactic fart? You take a few pictures for work, work the buckle tooth this way and that. That's a big deal, I guess. That's the reason we're here. Here. I mumble from my prison pillow. I think they might be fading. Fading. Kuiper. The volatiles. My butt marks, I correct you. Correct. You growling grin. Get back in position. Ricardo Marx is a poet and translator who lives in Lisbon. He has translated different poets into Portuguese and Carson. Really Collins, D. H. Lawrence, Patty Smith, and Vicente Huidurbo, among others. His most recent poems in English were published in the anthology Europo. In the autumn of 2019, a groundbreaking anthology on European futurist poetry organized and translated by him was published for the first time in Portuguese. And in 2020, his translations of 100 poems by Edwin Morgan was published in Lisbon. I am a poet and I am a translator, just like Edwin Morgan. To me, they are like yin and yang. They live together as one in me. They feed on each other. I'm extremely lucky to have discovered Morgan early in my life and to have been his reader and his translator into my mother tongue. When you dive deep into a poet's work like a translator does, its prosody and its character should resonate in all the words you choose. The many aspects of the poet's language should be in your mind and in your hand. With Edwin Morgan, it is no easy task to do so. His mastery of words is apparently simple syntax, the message. Congregate to create a very specific voice, a sound, one that is immediately recognizable, but that it juggles and pours differently in each poem he wrote. Thus, Edwin Morgan, like many of the great poets, is a subject of many designs, a master of disguise in language. In my mind, it is very fitting that we should celebrate him today when it is precisely 85 years since the passing of Fernand Psoa, whose intrinsic curiosity for everything that existed to live many lives in one is certainly akin to Edwin Morgan's. To read all of Morgan's work is then to embark on different journeys to different parts of the world and beyond to Saturn. But for now, I shall remain on this planet and choose a love poem to read, one of his best known and one of my favorites too. It is no doubt a love poem Morgan would write. Fueled by separation, the poetical subject a non-smoker seeks in the smoke of the loved one his presence, their love, and ironically reflects on it. One cigarette. No smoke without you, my fire. After you left, your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray and sent up a long thread of such quite gray, I smell to wonder who would believe its signal of so much love. One cigarette in the non-smoker's tray. As the last spire trembles up, a sudden draft blows it, binding into my face. Is it smell? Is it taste? You are here again and I'm drunk on your tobacco lips. Out with the light, let the smoke lie back in the dark. Till I hear the very ash sigh down among the flowers of brass, I'll breathe and long past midnight your last kiss. In many ways, my answer can be seen as a continuation of the poem, an epilogue, but on the other hand, it can be a very different version of the story. After I left, no smoke, no fire, nothing. Was it a dream? And what is a dream? Newspapers scraps down the street, tossing against corners, wind blowing litter all around. Only the road, iridescent and red, reminds me of you. No smoke beyond these windows now, no fire behind that door. My pack of cigarettes empty and obscure after I left. I even forgot where the ash tray was, what you said. Nothing equals nothing, as I close the door behind us and let the smoke imagine itself. Peter McCary was born in Paisley and brought up in Glasgow and he studied and worked in Europe, Africa and Asia and he lives in Geneva. He has a PhD from Glasgow University in Scottish and Russian literature. He's worked as a freelance translator and for many years as head of language services for the World Health Organization. He has five slim volumes of poetry to his name, brought together in collected contraptions by Carkinet in 2011. Edwin Morgan supervised his PhD and later Morgan and McCary became friends. So you've asked me to read a poem of Edwin Morgan's in one of mine in response and it was actually a bit of choice because he was my supervisor when I was working at Hugh McDermott from 1978 and at one point he was writing his sonnets from Scotland and in those sonnets from Scotland there was one, I mentioned to him there was a poem by German Lee Hawkins of the Inverse Nade but also there was a Russian philosopher called Vladimir Staloviev who had landed up in Inverse Nade too. So one of the sonnets from Scotland is actually with my dedication on Vladimir Staloviev. So that was one that was impossible but then I thought no there wasn't the rest. After that we did a series of poems because with a kind of running argument about Shakespeare with all due respect of which there is tons of course. I never really liked Shakespeare that much, I've been to terrible coldness to him and Morgan of course was a hundred percent fan and so although he said Bertolt Brecht would more or less have agreed with me in some points. So we exchanged a bunch of poems, I just sent him one as a joke practically and he rolled back more or less straight away with his version, it was a parody of a Matthew Arnold poem and moved through about half a dozen different poets finishing up with a Shakespeare sonnet which was Julie parodyed by me and then by him. But just to give an idea of it the the first one on starting off from the Matthew Arnold I said all pains the immortal spirit must endure all weakness that impairs all griefs that kill for so much grist to that fantastic mill. Eddie's response to that was see Marlowe well all pains the immortal spirit must endure all weakness that impairs all griefs that phase rebels like him you feel to salt your plays. So that was a good fun but as an example of something of Eddie Morgan's that I would really like to read there was a surprising one he wrote for Gale Turnbull, Gale Turnbull another Scottish poet for his 70th birthday we decided to put together a fessure, a collection of poems by poets he knew and these included people like Robert Creeley, Edwin Morgan Christopher Middleton, Sid Corman, Omar Pound son of and so when I asked Eddie today he immediately acquiesced and he produced this poem called My Moriscos which is like my moors or black and moors my North Africans because he knew that Gale Turnbull was a Morris dancer and I'd also known that Gale was a Morris dancer and I always regarded it as a bit of a joke which annoyed Gale because all my recollection of the Morris dancing when I saw them in Oxford was these strangely dressed people who were tinkling up and down the road but Gale himself did it and it wasn't just on high days and holidays in the middle of towns for example in his book A Year in the Day he says May the 1st 6 30 a.m at just over 1300 feet wind driving the rain anorak slapping six men on highest point of the movers but even the sheep looking miserable in the swirling clouds dancing the rose so it was something that Gale took very seriously and Eddie Morgan latched on to that and wrote this poem called My Moriscos in it he's also punning on his name which he was laterally beginning to read as beginning to play on in his poetry you didn't see that in the early days of stuff later on you did so you reverse himself as the old moor towards the end so My Moriscos for Gale Turnbull's 70th birthday they never danced by day but only in the darkest night or sometimes by moonlight their clothes were always white it was their way what did they say to each other nothing were they smiling no at times the wind would blow even danced in the snow brother to brother tonight the square is ice the town snores I lie in my window bed the sky is as black and cold as I hear the mice the scrapings mingle with the jingle of ankle bells unsleeping and stamping feet unslipping and ghostly staves unslapping in the stony dingle and the old moor in his room turned over and went to sleep the dark and the cold would keep that the bell is still clash and leap to dawn the gloom so that poem as I said was published in I think all the gathering for Gale Turnbull and Gale was a great proponent of the Scottish Parliament and he was very very happy when in 1990 I think it was voted for so I thought the poem I would read would be from the same collection that Edward Morgan published his in there's a poem on the referendum now it's from me that the question should Scotland have a parliament was equivalent to the question does Scotland exist and the answer was yes at least that was what the vote was and so it reminded me of the controversy between David Hume and Bishop Barclay because Bishop Barclay was arguing there was no such thing as material existence and it drove David Hume daft because he couldn't find a rational argument against it but he didn't find it convincing so that's what the link is here a referendum day irrefutable and unconvincing to David Hume of Bishop Barclay's argument that a tree unseen by anyone in a wood is undemonstrable and does not exist Hume wouldn't let in God for the trees to root in his attention nor would he let the leprechaun of reason from his group but the thought that those elaborate dendrological arrangements were a class that snapped to attention when the teacher turned from the board must have driven them crackers I can see him in the staff room don't fret the raptor the patrol's been vorlich brings great clefts of pine to be as it seeks out other things the cushioned thump at the back of the woodpecker's skull the stuck of sap when it wadges itself like a dog that grips a stick the ramp and tilt of slaters and the gullies of its bark suggest that yes the tree is there says Barclay show it to me I can't and when I fly away from Scotland packing it carefully down in cotton wool for another year when I think of it years old as any tree am I using a roman stone for a step is this the last light from a done star reeling into my eye like a measuring tape I hope you've enjoyed the poems as much as I have I begin to draw the program to a close now with my choice there are so many poems it's difficult to choose a favorite or a best of I find that really really hard but this particular poem I have chosen is very dear to me it's in a sequence called unfinished poems from the collection the new Devan they are about the unfinished rather than being unfinished themselves but Morgan deliberately breaks off at the end of the work and it feels unexpectedly it feels as if he's done that almost severely you'll see the effect that has in a few minutes they were written for the young Glasgow poet and theorist Veronica Forrest Thompson who died tragically young Morgan had known her and encouraged her work and you can see the sense of loss in the poems you can also feel by kind of emotional deduction his strong belief in a willed future in acting thoughtfully existentially and lovingly pain to know pain not knowing pain to love pain not loving pain on the rack pain in the rocking chair wrong to meet wrong not to wrong to be barren wrong to bear wrong for elegies and for silence almost right to fuel this almost right the heart searching almost right to be at the barriers and not right to scream or shout and not right the throne of doubt and not right to sidle out but to take the pain and use it to see the wrong not lose it to give the love well the poem I wanted to read in response was a poem I wrote really in the first few years of knowing Edwin and it's called in your generous hours and the poem will tell you why I've chosen it in the plantation of focus group trees allow the pine martin the bumbling morning simple kappa cali the crossbills clip clip allow the lips the licks of sea locks the dribbling pouts of dams allow the crime of the bramble the nettles spite give the light some latitude snagging in your lungs coffers have coffers the kiss their kiss allow to exist the ledge as a place of flowers allow in your generous hours by the substantiated cities the suburbs they're off the hangar song they're agreed to belong to pretend to the lens and breath of the country be friendly in dialects of body language telepathy assume trust with credulous fish with de-factory cattle allow a little at our at the altar say confidential with your future to the limits of scanners wide the screens bleary plate you better not be late for enjoying the making of things make things includes silence you have a license to treasure affection in the diving chamber to welcome partner from our recovery slumber our plural known as lovers to discover the places that happened to grow you up in the schools and the schemes the smokes and the smacks or you better relax you're attached to the universe but the tenderest of chances make allowances allow me finally let's hear from edwin himself this is a recording by the poetry archive copies of whose tapes the british library keep for long-term preservation it's one of his most loved lyrics strawberries strawberries they were never strawberries like the ones we had that's sultry afternoon sitting on a step of the open french window facing each other your knees held in mine the blue plates in our laps the strawberries glistening in the hot sunlight we dipped them in sugar looking at each other not hurrying the feast for one to come the empty plates laid on the stone together with the two forks crossed and i bent toward you sweet in that air in my arms abandoned like a child from your eager mouth the taste of strawberries in my memory lean back again let me love you let the sun beat on our forgetfulness one hour of all the heat intense and summer lightning on the glopatic hills let the storm wash the plates