A Home in Space - by Edwin Morgan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Reveals Edwin Morgan's groundbreaking multimedia poetics beyond his celebrated lyric voice.

Edwin Morgan is best remembered as Scotland's foremost national poet, a bold, lyric voice who shaped conversations around queerness, politics, and postwar life. But Morgan was also a restless experimenter working far beyond traditional verse. This book brings together, for the first time, the full range of his visual and sound poetry--from vibrant poster poems and surrealist collages to concrete poetry, cut-ups, and poem-sculptures. It reveals Morgan as a major figure in twentieth-century multimedia art, linking language, image, and sound in surprising and timely ways. Attuned to questions of identity, ecology, and empire, Morgan's work remains as urgent and inventive as ever--a celebration of poetic form at its most expansive and alive.

Review Quotes

"This is a marvelous book, revealing for the first time the full range of generous wit with which Morgan wrote radical new poetries. Here, indeed, are oodles of thrillingly self-estranging technical experiment and much avant-garde mischief."

--Drew Milne, Judith E. Wilson Professor of Poetics, University of Cambridge, and author of "In Darkest Capital: Collected Poems"

"A Home in Space is a fantastic presentation of the extensive work of the Scottish visual/concrete poet Edwin Morgan. Thomas and Johnstone have created an artfully curated volume that showcases the many dimensions of Morgan's practice--from his early scrapbooks through his explorations of typewriter, graphic, visual poetics in various media. Thomas's initial essay situates Morgan's work in the context of twentieth-century literary activity, making the case once and for all that visual poetry was a central--rather than marginal--component of modern aesthetics. For those unfamiliar with the poet, this is a terrific introduction and, for those already fans, the book is an opportunity to appreciate the range and variety of Morgan's thought and expression. So much of his work is scattered and distributed in different venues and repositories and circulated in niche networks that the sheer effort of locating, selecting, and collating this collection is admirable. It's such a pleasure to see the combination of solid research and beautifully designed publication honoring Morgan's creative spirit."

--Johanna Drucker, author of "Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture" and "Inventing the Alphabet"

"This eagerly awaited study is a veritable triumph. Greg Thomas's fine introduction ranges seamlessly over the intricate details of Morgan's multifaceted career as a poet. The decision to reproduce many of the poetic texts in the versions that Morgan himself devised enhances the book's historical importance."

--Stephen Bann, emeritus professor of history of art, University of Bristol, and editor of "Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology"

"Edwin Morgan's is the kind of poetry I want. A Home in Space is a multiverse chock full of concrete word-patterning, sound-ups and cut-ups, galaxies and constellations, collages, overlays, typographic arrays, acoustic riffs, lettrist elations and noncesensical confabulations, graphic designs, ur-computer inventions, and iconoclastic ads and icons. Thomas and Johnstone's detailed, historically informative, and discerning introduction sets the stage for Morgan's verbo-visual-vocal--patalexical! polychromatic!--lollapalooza of a book."

--Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

About the Author

Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is widely recognized as Scotland's foremost national poet. He published twenty-five collections of his own poetry, and became the first Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999 and the inaugural Makar or National Poet of Scotland in 2000. Greg Thomas is a writer, critic, poet, and artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland and has written extensively on visual and concrete poetry, text art, and multimedia art. Julie Johnstone is an artist, curator, editor, and publisher based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was previously the head librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and established and curated the Edwin Morgan Archive at the Library.