A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry

by Edwin Morgan, edited by Greg Thomas, edited by Julie Johnstone

Edwin Morgan is best remembered as Scotland’s foremost national poet, a bold, lyric voice who shaped conversations around queerness, politics and post-war 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.

Reviews of A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry

‘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. Greg Thomas and Julie 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