A Book of Lives

Edwin Morgan

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781847778239
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Containing poems written by Edwin Morgan during the past six years, this collection looks at human life from a variety of perspectives, encompassing a range of themes, the foremost of which is history. This new work displays the author'scharacteristic willingness to experimentwith a variety of subjects, from the history of cancer to the new Scottish parliament.

Planet Wave

The first half of this sequence of poems, commissioned by the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival, and set to music by Tommy Smith, was first performed in the Cheltenham Town Hall on 4 April 1997.

In the Beginning

(20 Billion BC)

Don’t ask me and don’t tell me. I was there.

It was a bang and it was big. I don’t know

what went before, I came out with it.

Think about that if you want my credentials.

Think about that, me, it, imagine it

as I recall it now, swinging in my spacetime hammock,

nibbling a moon or two, watching you.

What am I? You don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

I am the witness, I am not in the dock.

I love matter and I love anti-matter.

Listen to me, listen to my patter.

Oh what a day (if it was day) that was!

It was as if a fist had been holding fast

one dense packed particle too hot to keep

and the fingers had suddenly sprung open

and the burning coal, the radiant mechanism

had burst and scattered the seeds of everything,

out through what was now space, out

into the pulse of time, out, my masters,

out, my friends, so, like a darting shoal,

like a lion’s roar, like greyhounds released,

like blown dandelions, like Pandora’s box,

like a shaken cornucopia, like an ejaculation –

I was amazed at the beauty of it all,

those slowly cooling rosy clouds of gas,

wave upon wave of hydrogen and helium,

spirals and rings and knots of fire, silhouettes

of dust in towers, thunderheads, tornadoes;

and then the stars, and the blue glow of starlight

lapislazuliing the dust-grains –

I laughed, rolled like a ball, flew like a dragon,

zigzagged and dodged the clatter of meteorites

as they clumped and clashed and clustered into

worlds, into this best clutch of nine

whirled in the Corrievreckan of the Sun.

The universe had only just begun.

I’m off, my dears. My story’s still to run!

The Early Earth

(3 Billion BC)

Planets, planets – they seem to have settled

into their orbits, round their golden lord,

their father, except he’s not their father,

they were all born together, in that majestic wave

of million-degree froth and jet and muck:

who would have prophesied the dancelike separation,

the nine globes, with their moons and rings, rare –

do you know how rare it is, dear listeners,

dear friends, do you know how rare you are?

Don’t you want to be thankful? You suffer too much?

I’ll give you suffering, but first comes thanks.

Think of that early wild rough world of earth:

lurid, restless, cracking, groaning, heaving,

swishing through space garbage and flak,

cratered with a thousand dry splashdowns

painted over in molten granite. Think of hell,

a mineral hell of fire and smoke. You’re there.

What’s it all for? Is this the lucky planet?

Can you down a pint of lava, make love

to the Grand Canyon, tuck a thunderbolt

in its cradle? Yes and no, folks, yes and no.

You must have patience with the story.

I took myself to the crest of a ridge

once it was pushed up and cooled.

There were more cloudscapes than earthquakes.

You could walk on rock and feel rain.

You shivered but smiled in the fine tang.

Then I came down to stand in the shallows

of a great ocean, my collar up to the wind,

but listen, it was more than the wind I heard,

it was life at last, emerging from the sea,

shuffling, sliding, sucking, scuttling, so small

that on hands and knees I had to strain my eyes.

A trail of half-transparent twitchings!

A scum of algae! A greening! A breathing!

And no one would stop them, volcanoes wouldn’t stop them!

How far would they go? What would they not try?

I punched the sky, my friends, I punched the sky.

End of the Dinosaurs

(65 Million BC)

If you want life,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004
• Acknowledge the Unacknowledged Legislators!
• The Cost of Pearls
• Lines for Wallace
• The Battle of Bannockburn
• James IV To his Treasurer
• Retrieving & Renewing
• Planet Wave
• Valentine Weather
• Three Songs
• Old Gorbals
• 1955 – A Recollection
• My First Octopus
• Boethius
• Charles V
• Oscar Wilde
• Hirohito
• New Times
• Gorgo and Beau
• Questions I
• Questions II
• The Welcome
• Brothers and Keepers
• The Old Man and E.A.P.
• An Old Woman’s Birthday
• For David Daiches, on his Ninetieth Birthday
• A Birthday: for I.H.F.
• Wild Cuts (with Hamish Whyte)
• Five Paintings
• Love and a Life
• The War on the War on Terror
• Conversation in Palestine
• Also by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet
• About the Author
• Copyright