This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanzas - together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.

Introduced by Ali Smith, the title of this group of poems about people is taken from Morgan's poem 'Pelagius', the theologian who is a kind of alter ego. Morgan has the ability to enter into so many lives: the blind hunchback of 'In the Snack-bar', Jesus's judge in 'Pilate at Fortingall', the Polish juggler and acrobat 'Cinquevalli' (another alter ego), even Rameses II in 'The Mummy'. 'Morgan, I said to myself, take note, / Take heart. In a time of confusion / You must make a stand.'

"I try to write something every day even though I am not writing poetry, just to get myself in touch with language."-Edwin Morgan Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern literature. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the playful to the profound. Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language presents previously uncollected prose - journalism, book and theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio scripts, forewords and afterwords - all carefully moulded to the needs of differing audiences. Morgan's writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find surprises and delights in this new collection.

There is something profligate in the range and quality of Morgan's work as a translator. He does the labour of ten writers, and with blithe sprezzatura, partly at least because his own work nourishes itself from the poetry of other lands and ages. It is part of the necessary mechanism that Morgan, as a Scot, employs to define his place as a European, to escape the tonal and cultural limitations which England can imply.
"Collected Translations" includes six decades of work. Readers will find here Morgan's celebrated Mayakovsky done into Scots, his Voznesensky,
Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the French--Leopardi,
Quasimodo, Montale, Guillevic, Provert and Michaux; and there is Heine, and
Lorca, Cernuda and Brecht and Enzensberger and Braga. And much, much more.

Edwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind to expatiate on a wide range of subjects, social, psychological, philosophical. Some of the poems have been set to music, both jazz and classical. In many ways it is a book of voices and observation, a book of accessible storytelling.

In this haunting poem from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Scots-born writer James Thomson anticipated the modern age's nightmare vision of the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair. In contrast to the late Victorian confidence all around him, Thomson dared to face the possibility that the universe was utterly indifferent to human affairs. The strange and dark images in The City of Dreadful Night have become a landmark of modern literature, for the tomb-like streets and empty squares in this memorable poem preceded T.S Eliot's The Waste Land, and the darker visions of expressionism and surrealism by over forty-five years. Published in instalments in 1874 and then in book form in 1880, The City of Dreadful Night has long been unavailable as a complete text. This exciting new edition is introduced and annotated by Edwin Morgan, long an admirer of Thomson's work, and a leading modern poet in his own right.

The Communicado Theatre's production of this verse rendering won the Edinburgh Fringe First award at the 1992 Festival, and has gone on to tour Scotland and England in 1992-3. Edwin Morgan provides an introduction, which sets the play in its time and discusses the style of his translation; it aims to provide insight and stimulation to a new generation of readers and playgoers.

Preface by Alasdair Gray Blasting into the future, across alien worlds and distant galaxies, fantastic technologies and potential threats to humanity, Where Rockets Burn Through brings science fiction and poetry together in one explosive, genre-busting collection. Discover an array of poems by more than forty contemporary UK writers, including Edwin Morgan, Jane Yolen, Ron Butlin, WN Herbert, Ken MacLeod and Kirsten Irving, plus an exclusive essay on Sci-fi poetry by Steve Sneyd. Jump in, strap up and switch on the photon cannon -

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEAD This book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision. MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poems on the modern world and city life. Liz Lochhead writes with an alert and sensitive eye on personal relationships and women's experience of them. The book provides an invaluable introduction to modern Scottish poetry and to the poets who are arguably its greatest practitioners.

To catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.