A Book of Lives E-Book

Edwin Morgan

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

No wonder Edwin Morgan was Scotland's best-loved poet. His poems teem with lives and loves and are marked by an unusual love of the present and the future. He finds forms for themes and ideas just out of reach. In this collection poems both profound and witty are to be found: occasional verse that transcends its occasion, explorations of the human condition conducted with a virtuosic lightness of touch. A Book of Lives draws together the themes that inform his poetic world. The largest vistas of human history, from twenty billion years BC to 9/11 and the 'war on terror'; Scotland from Bannockburn to the opening of the Scottish parliament; portraits - of Rimbaud, the emperor Hirohito, Raeburn's skating Reverend Walker... Poems for birthdays and elegies celebrate friends; a dramatic dialogue about cancer sets personal experience in a wry evolutionary context. At the heart of the collection, a major sequence, 'Love and a Life', affirms the inextinguishable energies of love and art.

Leseprobe

EDWIN MORGAN

A Book of Lives

Contents

Title Page

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

The Red Coat

Knock at the Door

The Good Years

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)

Natural Philosophy

A Bird Too Many

Sure of a Big Surprise

A Drip Too Many

Soothe and Improve

A Whizz Too Many

Last Days

A Movement Too Many

Five Paintings

Salvador Dali: Christ of St John of the Cross

Sir Henry Raeburn: Portrait of Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch

Rembrandt: Man in Armour

Joan Eardley: Flood-Tide

Avril Paton: Windows on the West

Love and a Life

The War on the War on Terror

Conversation in Palestine

Also by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which poems first appeared: Addicted to Brightness (Long Lunch Press), The Book of Questions, The Hand that Sees: poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCOSOE and SPL), the Herald, the London Review of Books, Map, New Writing 13, Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (Crescent), Painted, Spoken, PN Review, Proof, Scotland on Sunday, the Scotsman, The Wallace Muse (Luath).

‘For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament’ was commissioned by the Parliament and read at the opening ceremony on 9 October 2004. Scottish Parliamentary copyright, reprinted by permission.

‘Acknowledge the Unacknowledged Legislators!’ was written for the launch of the Cross-Party Group on Scottish Writing and Publishing 2005.

The Battle of Bannockburn was published with Robert Baston’s Latin text in 2004 jointly by Akros Publications, Mariscat Press and the Scottish Poetry Library.

‘Retrieving & Renewing’ was commissioned by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

‘Valentine Weather’ was published online by the Scottish Poetry Library.

‘Three Songs’ was written for the band Idlewild.

‘My First Octopus’ was written to be broadcast by BBC radio on National Poetry Day 2004.

Gorgo and Beau was commissioned by BBC Radio Scotland and broadcast on 29 December 2003.

‘The Welcome’ was written for the International Federation of Library Authorities (IFLA) Conference 2002.

‘Brothers and Keepers’ was written for a conference of social workers.

Love and a Life was published by Mariscat Press in 2003.

For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004

Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in; light of the mind, shine out!

We have a building which is more than a building.

There is a commerce between inner and outer, between brightness and shadow, between the world and those who think about the world.

Is it not a mystery? The parts cohere, they come together like petals of a flower, yet they also send their tongues outward to feel and taste the teeming earth.

Did you want classic columns and predictable pediments? A growl of old Gothic grandeur? A blissfully boring box?

Not here, no thanks! No icon, no IKEA, no iceberg, but curves and caverns, nooks and niches, huddles and heavens, syncopations and surprises. Leave symmetry to the cemetery.

But bring together slate and stainless steel, black granite and grey granite, seasoned oak and sycamore, concrete blond and smooth as silk – the mix is almost alive – it breathes and beckons – imperial marble it is not!

Come down the Mile, into the heart of the city, past the kirk of St Giles and the closes and wynds of the noted ghosts of history who drank their claret and fell down the steep tenement stairs into the arms of link-boys but who wrote and talked the starry Enlightenment of their days –

And before them the auld makars who tickled a Scottish king’s ear with melody and ribaldry and frank advice –

And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things, not set upon an hill with your nose in the air,

This is where you know your parliament should be

And this is where it is, just here.

What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.

A nest of fearties is what they do not want.

A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.

A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.

And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.

Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians, you are picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem that has been almost but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or forgotten.

When you convene you will be reconvening, with a sense of not wholly the power, not yet wholly the power, but a good sense of what was once in the honour of your grasp.

All right. Forget, or don’t forget, the past. Trumpets and robes are fine, but in the present and the future you will need something more.

What is it? We, the people, cannot tell you yet, but you will know about it when we do tell you.

We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.

We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold.

We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.

So now begin. Open the doors and begin.

Acknowledge the Unacknowledged Legislators!

Go on, squawk at the font, you chubby Scotty.

You have a long song ahead of you, do you know that?

Of course not, but you let the ghost of a chuckle

Emerge and flicker as if you had thrown

Your very first chuckle and the water was playful.

It will be, and gurly too, and full of dread

Once you are grown and reckoning ahead.

So squeal a little, kick a little, what’s a few drops

On that truly enormous human brow.

Man is chelovek, the Russians say,

The one with a forehead, the one with forethought,

The one whose mumbling and chuntering will not do,

Who knows it will not do, who lolls or bounces

Half-formed but strains for form, to be a child

And not a bundle! The bungler, the mumbler

Takes the deepest breath we are allowed,

Whistles the horizon’s dawn right down

Across the book of earth, audits the figures,

Tongue and teeth and lips in line, near-perfect,

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord, the poet

Has hooked one leg over his simple chair-arm,

Sometimes tapping the beat upon his snuff-box,

Sometimes singing an old and well-loved air

To startlingly original effect.

He’ll print it too! Won’t it be in a book?

An open mind is proper in this case.

It’s only poetry, after all. Someone –

I can’t remember thousands of scribbling names –

Has said ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’

I find that slightly fundamentalist.

Yes, but do I go along with it?

I do not go along with it. No, I don’t.

Do I protest too much? Probably!

Think of what I said about the child.

He is a man now, let us talk to him.

Ask him how far he thinks his birkie

Registers on a Richter scale of insult.

He’s dead? Well, get a good dictionary.

Talk’s the thing. Dialogue’s the thing.

If any parliamentarian should be so remiss

As to think writers are interchangeable,

Or stupid, or irrelevant, or poor doomy creatures,

Punishments may have to be devised,

I say may, we want to persuade, not scold.

What is it but language that clamps

A country to glory? Ikons, concertos,

Pietàs, gamelans, gondolas, didgeridoos,

Luboks, a brace of well-tuned sleigh-bells –

These are very fine, of course they are.

But better still, always far better still

Is the sparkling articulacy of the word,

The scrubbed round table where poet and legislator

Are plugged in to the future of the race,

Guardians of whatever is the case.

The Cost of Pearls

Do you want to challenge that dervish Scotland?

Even and only being interrogated

by a swash of centenarian mussels

black-encrusted and crusty with it?

When they folded their arms and gave such a click

it could be heard right down Strathspey,

did you reckon the risk of a dialogue was minimal?

‘Come on then, have at you!’ It was like an old play

though far from funny. ‘All that winking stuff,

that metal, those blades,

you think we don’t know death when we smell it?’

‘Your nose deceives you. We are observers, explorers.

We heard there was a murmuring of mussels,

a clatter and a chatter

somewhere in the gravel-beds of unbonny Scotland,

almost like voices threatening something – ’

‘Damn sure we were threatening something! Do you know

a thousand of us were killed in one day

not long ago – ’ ‘I heard it was eight hundred – ’

‘Eight hundred, ten hundred, it was a massacre.

Your pearl poachers breenged through our domains like demons

with their great gully knives and scythed us to shreds

for what might be, most likely might not be,

a pearl, a pearl of price, a jeweller’s price.

I hear a shuffling of papers. Prepare yourself.

We are our wisest, neither clique nor claque

but full conclave. We want to know,

and we will know, what is it gives you

your mania for killing. Don’t interrupt!

For a few smouldering prettinesses

at neck and brow you would ransack

a species. I said don’t interrupt,

we have all the time in the world

and I can hear the steady footfall

(that’s a joke, you may smile)

as our oldest and wisest, worthily High Mussel

at a hundred and forty-nine, filtering and harrumphing

(no, you must not smile now),

angrily kicking the gravel, and with a last sift and puff

(no no, this is not funny, think of his powers)

commands the interrogation to begin.’