Page 19 - Edwin Morgan News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Edwin Morgan in his younger days 2 Born in 1920, in the west end of Glasgow, his parents Stanley and Margaret were politically conservative and Presbyterian. His father was a director of a small firm of iron and steel merchants. Edwin attended the former Rutherglen Academy, and the High School of Glasgow. 3 While he was at Glasgow University, World War II broke out and, having registered as a conscientious objector, Edwin served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1940. He returned to university in 1946 and a year later graduated with first class honours before joining the staff of t...

FROM 1931 to 1934, the mammoth shape of Hull Number 534, the unnamed Cunard ocean-liner that was to have been the salvation of the River Clyde, loomed unfinished in the stocks over the John Brown Engineering Works in Clydebank. Construction was suspended on 10 December 1931, plunging thousands into unemployment and poverty in the weeks before Christmas. Looking over Dumbarton Road from the tenements opposite, the rust-red hull of the unfinished ship must have resembled the skeleton of some extinct behemoth, and workers – from the riveters and caulkers of the black squads to the engineer...

By Katy Hastie Edwin Morgan, pictured at his home in Glasgow in 2002. The new project is inspired by the poet WHEN it comes to aging, sometimes the publishing world can appear more cut-throat than a beauty pageant. Many prizes single out those under 40 or 30 as though those were peaks to reach and not promising beginnings. While it’s important to nurture talent, particularly in those marginalised and bereft of the material securities behind some careers, it can convey the impression that taking more swings around the sun before you...

Burns night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like this current pandemic and lockdown So here, to help you through, are twenty of Scotland’s greatest poets, who aren’t Robert Burns. William Dunbar (circa 1459-1530) “Back to Dunbar!” was a favourite phrase of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the man he was talking about was a Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James IV, who wrote works that were rhetorical and lyrical marvels. Dunbar was one of a group of medieval Scots known as the “makars” an...

It was electrifying, proper shiver-down-the-spine stuff, a reminder how powerful poetry can be. In first year at secondary school, I remember the impact of reading Edwin Morgan, Stevie Smith and Christina Rossetti for the first time (we had a brilliant English teacher, who opened our eyes and ears to a whole world of words beyond the prescribed texts we sat down to in class, and the limitations of the syllabus.) Love of poetry has stayed with me, through university, where I studied everything from Emily Dickinson to the Scottish Ballads, and discovered, via the Edinburgh Fringe, Roger M...