Carol Ann Duffy / Valentine

VALENTINE

by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy / Valentine

Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Carol Ann Duffy / Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway

by Carol Ann Duffy

'I gyve unto my wife mi second best bed...' 

(from Shakespeare's will)

Carol Ann Duffy / Anne Hathaway

The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlights, clifftops, seas

where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed 

a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head

as he held me upon that next best bed.

Carol Ann Duffy / Warming her pearls

Warming her pearls

by Carol Ann Duffy

for Judith Radstone

Carol Ann Duffy / Entibiando sus perlas

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress

bids me wear them, warm them, until evening

when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them

round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk

or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself

whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering

each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She’s beautiful. I dream about her

in my attic bed; picture her dancing

with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent

beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit’s foot,

watch the soft blush seep through her skin

like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass

my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see

her every movement in my head…. Undressing,

taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching

for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does…. And I lie here awake,

knowing the pearls are cooling even now

in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night

I feel their absence and I burn.

Les Murray / On the Mitchells

Les Murray
Poster by T.A.

On The Mitchells

The following article was written by the editor for The English Review, a UK journal for A-level English Literature students. A slightly modified version of it was published in Vol. 17, No. 2, Nov. 2006. Reproduced with permission.

ARTICLE

Jason Clapham shows how Les Murray's sonnet "The Mitchells" is interesting for students of post-colonial literature as well as those exploring what the sonnet can do

There are certain poems that are difficult to write about because they are so easy. This is not usually the case with Les Murray's work: dense and outspoken, his poems lend themselves readily to detailed analysis and discussion. But "The Mitchells" is different: on first glance it seems to be no more than an affectionate description of two men taking a lunch break in the outback.

Celebrating something without giving it away

One way to approach poems such as these is to start not with language and form but with the key question the reader is left with. In this case, what is it about the Mitchells that the poet thinks is worth writing about? There is an interesting humility about the men, choosing to boil their water in a "prune tin" and wear an "oil-stained felt hat" even though one of them "has been rich". Then there is the curious delayed response of the second Mitchell, who would look up "with pain and subtle amusement" before repeating an identical phrase, "I'm one of the Mitchells". In fact, these two features are related: the faint, understated humour at work here is reminiscent of a quality Murray associates with "deeply Australian" traits of "restraint" coupled with the "sardonic".

Seen in the light of Murray's comments, the poem appears to be a study of Australian rural culture, even a celebration of it. Some years before writing this poem Murray expressed a "paradoxical" desire to "celebrate something without giving it away", and this poem appears to do that. There is a festive quality about the "unthinning mists of white // bursaria blossom", both in their appearance and in bursaria being another name for The Christmas Bush (as it flowers in the Australian midsummer).

The fact that the bees are described as working a "shift" creates a connection between their work in the Australian flora—bursaria and wattles—and that of the men working the land, while the second Mitchell holds leaves in his hand as he gives his name, creating a strong association between the men's identity and the land they farm.

The poem as a sonnet

It therefore might seem odd for Murray to choose the sonnet, a quintessentially European form, with resonances (for us) of genteel love games and the Elizabethan court. Taking a post-colonial approach, commentators such as Ashcroft would not be surprised: as he says in The Empire Writes Back, Les Murray

faces two directions, wishing to reconstitute experience through an act of writing which uses the tools of one culture or society and yet seeks to remain faithful to the experiences of another. (59)

The "Mitchells" does at first seem to support such a reading. A cursory glance at the poem establishes the traditional division into octave and sestet, with the octave further divided into two quatrains (at least visually). More important, perhaps, is the sense of a volta in the unexpected switch to urban in the final line, "Sometimes the scene is an avenue". As in a traditional sonnet, this line effectively alters the meaning of the sonnet as a whole: the urban "avenue" suggests that this "pair" of men represent something broader than a particular rural culture, they represent Australia itself.

We might read this as an irreverent post-colonial "subversion" of the genre. Murray has replaced the urbanity and confident virtuosity expected of the sonnet with plain speaking ("I am seeing this") and an awkward hesitation ("raise / I think for wires … The first man, if asked …"). Instead of aristocratic amours, this sonnet cheerfully presents workmen eating "big meat sandwiches out of a Styrofoam / box with a handle". There might be something indecorous about the pronounced caesurae that slice through four lines, and about the four enjambed lines of the octave; the thirteen, fourteen and sixteen syllable lines seem to struggle against the confinement of the sonnet "box". In "The Quality of Sprawl", a poem published shortly after "The Mitchells", the poet seems to describe this spirit of irreverence as quintessentially Australian:

Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly ...

Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first 

lines in a sonnet, for example.

Sprawl gets up the nose of many people ...

So "The Mitchells" can be read as Murray working against the sonnet form, provoking the "centre", trying to free himself of it.

Beyond this, however, such readings are too limiting to allow us to discover much of interest about the poem. It is worth reminding ourselves that the octave-sestet structure of the sonnet dates back to pre-colonial Europe, beyond Dante to Lentini in early 13th century Italy. It could be argued that Murray is doing what poets have always done, importing foreign genres and adapting them to local language and experience (the English sonnet tradition began this way, with Wyatt in the sixteenth century). Seeing Murray as a sort of Janus, with one eye on the poetic genres of the "centre" and the other on the marginal "Otherness" of Australian experience is simply inaccurate. As he remarks in his introduction to Hell and After, Murray feels he has struggled throughout his career against "the narrow national protectionisms which still impede much poetry in English from reaching its natural public across the whole Anglophone world". Post-colonial readings, many of them emanating from the "centre", seem to constitute one such "protectionism", as they leave Murray with a secondary status.

The Vernacular Republic

Language is what "The Mitchells" is really about. The reader is immediately struck by the lack of literary pretension right from the opening four words of the poem, and the language of the whole poem seems to imitate the qualities of directness, reticence and humour discernable in the speech it includes. There is little that could be described as "non-standard" English, grammatically speaking, but the attempts to capture the cadences of Australian speech are unmistakable. This is particularly apparent on hearing Les Murray read this poem; listen, for example, to the elongation of the /a/ sound of the word "handle" and the lack of any sort of subordinating pause around the phrase "I think" in the third line.

The first published version of this poem bore the more grandiose title "Dedication, Written Last, for the Vernacular Republic" (1974). Although this was replaced, Murray used the idea of a "vernacular republic" for his 1976 edition of selected poems, where the Australian vernacular is held to be key to understanding Australian identity. It is "the matrix [of Australian] distinctiveness" he says, "[w]e are a colloquial nation", a "vernacular republic".

The poem dignifies Australian speech, presenting it as beautiful in its own way and worthy of being immortalised in the high art of the sonnet. In his review of The Macquarie Dictionary (the first dictionary of Australian English), Murray says

how much larger and richer our dialect is than many had thought ... gently but firmly shifting our linguistic perception, so that our entire language is henceforth centred for us, not thousands of miles away, but here where we live.

His poetry might be said to have a similar effect.

Nearly everything they say is ritual

In the third to last line of the poem, the reader is struck by an apparent disjunction between the second man announcing that he is "I'm one of the Mitchells" and our being told that one of the men "has been rich / but never stopped wearing the oil-stained felt hat". When we look at the following line the logic becomes clear: "Nearly everything / they say is ritual", the purpose of their speaking is, like many rituals, to express a sense of identity and belonging, and the hat serves also as a badge of identity. Indeed, the speaker persistently fails to distinguish one man from the other - what is important is the fact that they are both Mitchells, not their differences or Christian names.

It is worth noting that the name Mitchell, like the name Murray, is strongly associated with the Scottish settlers of Australia (Les Murray's own family arrived in Sydney from Scotland in 1848, fleeing poverty caused by the highland clearances). By declaring that they are Mitchells, the men are honouring their "lost" Gaelic roots, an important constituent of Australian identity: as Murray has said, "Many [Austrialians'] attitudes, even their turns of phrase, are only really comprehensible in terms of that lost inheritance". The poem as a whole can be seen as a sort of "clanship" ritual, like a number of other Murray poems, namely "Four Gaelic Poems", "A Skirl for Outsets" and "Elegy for Angus Macdonald of Cnoclinn" which concludes

.. Even the claim I make at times

to write Gaelic in English words 

would make you sniff (but also smile),

but my fathers were Highlanders long ago

then Borderers, before this landfall …

Waltzing Matilda

The Scottish theme is arguably continued in the ritualised actions of the men. The very act of brewing tea and eating together by a campfire is ritualistic, and peculiarly Australian. But many would be also be reminded of a better known bush tea drinker:

Oh! there once was a swagman camped in the Billabong,

Under the shade of a Coolabah tree;

And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling,

"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

Less well known, perhaps, is that this celebration of Australian experience and "unofficial national anthem" as it is sometimes called, was written by a poet also from New South Wales, of Scottish descent, and that the tune for "Waltzing Matilda" is actually a Scottish folk tune.

Who is seeing this?

One of the interesting features of "The Mitchells" is the positioning of the poem's speaker. At the opening of the poem he describes what he is "seeing", apparently at some distance or hidden in the wattles, close enough to hear the bees humming around it mingled with the mens' voices and the bubbling of the water. He seems unsure of the nature of the work they are undertaking and, as if seeking clarification "overhear[s]" a comment by "one" of the men (he is unsure which). The remainder of the poem is presented first in the conditional, as the speaker has an imaginary conversation with "the pair", perhaps because he is no longer able to hear, and then he makes an observation that could sounds made at a distance: "one has been rich / but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat".

So who is the speaker? The speaker's observation of the men seems to stand in for the reader's, his fascination prefigures our own. Like him, we live predominantly urban lives, amongst "avenues" rather than wattles, and watch this ritual and drama of this scene played out with a sense of nostalgia for the certainty with which they would answer the question left unspoken in the poem: who are you?

Further Reading

Ashcroft, B. (2002) The Empire Writes Back, New Accents

Longley, M. (2004) Snow Water, Jonathan Cape

Matthews, S. (2001) Les Murray, Manchester University Press.

Murray, L. (2003) New Collected Poems, Carcanet.

Murray, L. Hell and After (2005), Carcanet. [Read the Introduction]

Williams, H. (2005) Collected Poems, Faber.

– Jason Clapham teaches English at St Edward's Oxford

Les Murray on The Mitchells

After completing the article I had the opportunity to ask Les Murray about the poem. Here are some of the remarks he made in his fax of 22 March, 2006.

On title of the poem:

"I stuck with the longer and mightier title for a little while, quickly coming to the conclusion that it was too large a title for that short poem … The poem felt more comfortable with its less grandiose name "The Mitchells": that's a surname with some resonance in Oz, partly from the splendid white Major Mitchell cockatoo, partly from the real surname of Dame Nellie Melba [soprano], partly from the venerable Mitchell Library in Sydney etc. etc. though I was mainly thinking of Joe Michell, an itinerant working in Henry Lawson's short stories. The poem did stand as a sort of epigraph to Ethnic Radio [see Bibliography], in which the ethnicity I meant was an Australian one."

On the sonnet form:

"As to my attitude to the sonnet back then, I dimly recall preferring the Petrarchan to the Shakespearean because the Petrarchan tended to integrate the last six lines into the poem, even after a strong volta, while a Shakespearean one might be no more than 12-lines with a pat concluding couplet, like the rhymed couplet that often the end of a scene in one of the plays. But I was never very steamed up about all that, and I can't recall being very political about subverting the sonnet form, if indeed that's what I did. Maybe I was grinning to myself just a little though—I was still at war with the dimensions of Empire and Posh back then …"

LES MURRAY 

Les Murray / Predawn In Health

Predawn In Health

by Les Murray

The stars are filtering through a tree
outside in the moon's silent era.

Reality is moving layer over layer
like crystal spheres now called laws.

The future is right behind your head;
just over all horizons is the past.

The soul sits looking at its offer. 

Les Murray / Child logic

Child logic

by Les Murray

The smallest girl
in the wild kid's gang
submitted her finger
to his tomahawk idea -

It hurt bad, dropping off.
He knew he'd gone too far
and ran, herding the others.
Later on, he'd maim her brother.

She stayed in the bush
till sundown, wrote
in blood on the logs, and
gripped her gapped hand, afraid

what her family would say
to waste of a finger.
Carelessness. Mad kids.
She had done wrong some way.

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer: A Tribute

---

ROBERT HASS

Brick 80

Posted on June 1, 2007

Tomas Tranströmer published his first book of poems—the stunning 17 dikter—when he was twenty-three years old. Eight volumes have followed, each rather austere and beautifully made. The poems were, from the beginning, thick with the feel of life lived in a particular place: the dark, overpowering Swedish winters, the long thaws and brief paradisal summers in the Stockholm archipelago. But they were also piercing inward poems, full of strange and intense accuracies of perception. The most famous lines—

Awakening is a parachute jump from the dream.

or

December. Sweden is a hauled-up,
unrigged ship

—stay with one a long time. And there are whole passages equally indelible:

        Daybreak slams and slams in
the sea’s grey stone gateway, and the sun flashes
close to the world. Half-choked summer gods
        fumble in sea-mist.

And this:

The black-backed gull, the sun-skipper, steers his course.
Under him is wide water.
The world still sleeps like a
many-coloured stone in the water.
Undeciphered days. Days—
like Aztec hieroglyphs!

Hieroglyph is the right word. The brilliance of the metaphors, and their originality, was what most attracted the attention of other poets and made Tranströmer the most widely translated European poet of the post-war generation. His work has been translated into fifty languages, and as if each dialect required its own version,into English by English, Irish, Scottish, and American poets. This is remarkable at least in part because his work is not easy or immediately comforting. It was admired by poets first, and that is what the work in translation tells us.

His brilliance is very difficult to separate from the terseness and almost classical restraint of a style that makes almost all other poets seem garrulous, sociable, eager—even in their most rebellious attitudes—to please. Tranströmer’s metaphors have a way of suggesting an uncannily alert imagination turned to an undeciphered, but not entirely undecipherable, world. Its meanings often come in hints, glimpses along the way, sometimes brutal and ancient, sometimes unnervingly fresh. Almost always this world is as peculiar, bald, and hermetic as the opening of a hand when we cannot say whose it is or what purpose it intends. And almost always in the poems, the everyday world, the one organized for the purposes of power, commerce, pleasure, and transportation, is not the one we need to read. This way of seeing gives one the feeling, reading him, that one ought to wake up from whatever one’s previous idea of being awake was, and it has made him one of the most urgent imaginations of our time.

The later poems often occur in the moments between sleeping and waking, between work and home, as a commuter on the outskirts of cities, as a tourist at the edge of cultures. It wasn’t without profit that Tranströmer the poet practised his profession as a psychologist in small cities outside Stockholm, working as a psychotherapist and counsellor in an institution for juvenile offenders and then as a psychologist for a labour organization. This immersion, or submersion, in the working world may be what gives his poems their intense sense of what it is like for consciousness to try to locate itself around the edges of the meanings—social, political, existential—it finds itself among. That must be why so many of the poems take place along the blurred seams of twentieth-century life, when the imagination has come unhinged a little and ceases to know what it thinks it knows about itself. These poems, more than any others I can think of, convey a sense of what it is like to be a private citizen in the second half of the twentieth century. Anywhere this private citizenship exists—among the people who read and write books, for example—the phrase conveys the idea of a certain freedom, a certain level of comfort, and also some unease and isolation.

And this is another powerful feature of his art. It praises art, but it never claims any special privilege from the situation of the artist. Maybe it is in this way that Tranströmer’s break with modernism is most complete. Other poets of his time and of his stature—one thinks of Zbigniew Herbert, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky—have faced the public world and the public horrors of their time with an art in their hands that served as both a hermeunetic of suspicion and an honourable tradition of dissent, but Tranströmer’s poems don’t seem to lay claim to that tradition. Art, especially the art of music, comes into his poems as other hieroglyphs, hopeful scents picked up from the world’s unpromising winds. One of the most powerful of these images comes from his long poem Baltics, when he stumbles on a carved baptismal font in an old church:

In the half-dark corner of Gotland church, in the mildewed daylight
stands a sandstone baptismal font—12th century—the stonecutter’s name
still there, shining
like a row of teeth in a mass grave:
                HEGWALDR
   the name still there. And his scenes
here and on the sides of other vessels crowded with people, figures on their
   way out of the stone.
The eyes’ kernel of good and evil bursting there.
Herod at the table: the roasted cock flying up and crowing, “Christus natus est”—the servant
executed—
close by the child born, under clumps of faces as worthy
and helpless as young monkeys.
And the fleeing steps of the pious
drumming over the dragon scales of sewer mouths.
(The scenes stronger in memory than when you stand in front of them,
strongest when the font spins like a slow, rumbling carousel in the memory.)
Nowhere the lee-side. Everywhere risk.
As it was. As it is.
Only inside there is peace, in the water of the vessel that no one sees,
but on the outer walls the struggle rages.
And peace can come drop by drop, perhaps at night
when we don’t know anything,
or as when we’re taped to a drip in a hospital ward.

Reading this, one understands that part of Tranströmer’s power is that, all along, he has been doing the work of a religious temperament in a secular and dangerous age and why he is, as the poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson has written, “one of the central and most original poets of our time.”

Tomas suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed on his right side and that affected his speech. His wife, Monica, is a nurse. I am told that, while he was recovering, she drove to Stockholm, found a music store, and bought all the piano literature for one hand she could locate, drove home, gave it to Tomas, and told him to get to work. It must have been an effective therapy. Tomas was already an accomplished pianist, and his publisher Bonniers has recently issued a CD that combines recordings of his poems with recordings of his work at the piano. The piano performances, like his late works—the remarkable “Sad Gondola,” and the haiku, a few syllables like scratches in snow that make up most of The Great Enigma—feel like metaphors for his art. One hand finding its way, note by note, in a darkness it has made luminous.

Robert Hass’s most recent books are What Light Can Do, a volume of essays, and The Apple Trees at Olema, selected poems. He teaches literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

BRICK

Edwin Morgan / A sunburst of possibility amid the grey

Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan: a sunburst of possibility amid the grey

Edwin Morgan, who has died aged 90, brought Piaf, Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe into his verse life and opened doors to a joyous new world

Alan Spence
Sunday 22 August 2010 00.06 BST

E

arlier this year, to mark Edwin Morgan's 90th birthday, the Scottish Poetry Library and Mariscat Press published a festschrift in his honour and called it, simply, Eddie@90. The title is sufficient, its affectionate shorthand entirely appropriate, and there can't be many poets of whom that would be true. (Seamus Heaney? Carol Ann Duffy? Both, incidentally, contributed to the book).

There's a story that when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, at the age of 80, the doctor breaking the news to him said there was no way of knowing how long he had left — it might be six months, it might be six years. Eddie replied: "I'll have six years, please."

When he'd made it through those six years, he was determined to hold on until he was 90, and that landmark was cause for much celebration – events in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, a new collection of poems, Dreams and Other Nightmares, and the tribute book itself (in which one contributor imagined him smiling wryly at the premature tribute books). Those 10 years, from 80 to 90, were the most remarkable late flowering, even for a poet so accomplished and prolific. When he could no longer physically write or type, he dictated, and the poems kept coming until the effort was just too great. Ian Campbell of Edinburgh University, who visited him just over a week ago, marvelled at his "steadfast refusal to give in to self-pity or pessimism" and found him "still witty, even cheerful", still looking out of his window at worlds far beyond.

Then on Friday came the phone call, from his editor, publisher and friend Hamish Whyte: "Eddie's gone."

To Scottish writers of my generation, who came of age in the 1960s, Edwin Morgan was an inspiration and a revelation. Here was a world-class poet who was one of our own. In grey postwar Glasgow, his work was a sunburst of hope and possibility. He wrote about the world we inhabited, but placed it in a global, even a universal, context — From Glasgow to Saturn.

Like a great many young writers starting out at the time, I owed him a great debt. In my case it was quite specific – in 1966 he judged the Scotsman's school magazine competition and awarded a prize to one of my poems. I hadn't yet read any of his work – his early collections, published in the 1950s, were out of print. But I remember the thrill of excitement I felt on discovering his 1968 collection, The Second Life. (In Eddie@90, Catherine Lockerbie describes the same experience – the sheer beauty of the book, its coloured pages, the joyous explosion of language). There were poems on Hemingway and Piaf and Marilyn Monroe, poems set in Glasgow – Glasgow! – and the exhilarating experimentation, the virtuosity and playfulness of his concrete poetry. It was a book to stimulate and move and delight, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before. In retrospect I was to realise it was like nothing much anyone in Scotland had read before, in fact it was a radical departure for the poet himself, a stepping out into new forms and subject matter. It opened doors for all of us.

That same year I was doing readings at the Edinburgh Fringe with a loose-knit group of writers and musicians calling ourselves The Other People, inspired by the anarchic Tom McGrath, who persuaded Eddie to join us as a guest reader. His performance was glorious, adding another dimension to the work. In contrast to his mild, self-effacing, almost shy persona, the reading was powerful, profound, moving and at times uproariously funny. If he was a magician, a conjurer with words, his rendition of them could be incantatory, almost shamanistic, especially when delivering those mesmerising sound poems. (Seamus Heaney writes: "In that combination of shyness and certitude, his intellectual and artistic authority were unmistakable.")

As an academic too, in his long teaching career at Glasgow University, he could captivate his student audience, bring literature to life. (Marshall Walker spoke of his clarity, his conversational style, and said: "You always wished his lectures would keep going past the hour.") I remember sitting at a lecture he was giving on the Metaphysical poets, and looking along the row and seeing a friend of mine who was an engineering student. I asked why he was there, and he said: "To hear Eddie."

By the mid-70s, with a reference from Eddie, I was back at Glasgow as writer-in-residence, and he was happy to give advice, take part in readings, contribute to publications, always with humility, graciousness and goodwill. That held good in all the years since, at other events I've organised. The last of these was at the WORD Festival in Aberdeen, some 10 years ago. That must have been just as his illness was beginning to manifest itself, but you would never have known.

Seated on a bar stool, surrounded by Tommy Smith and the young musicians of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, he gave an electrifying performance of his poem-suite Planet Wave, dealing with nothing less than the history of life on Earth. It was sublime, an absolute high point.

Over these last few days, many tributes to the man and his work have been published and broadcast. Carol Ann Duffy called him "a great, gentle, generous genius". She said: "He was poetry's true son and blessed by her. He was, quite simply, irreplaceable."

In addition to a host of literary awards and prizes, he was declared Glasgow's first Poet Laureate, and Scotland's own Makar. He was commissioned to write the inaugural poem for the opening of the Scottish Parliament building in 2004, and a fine scathing job he made of it, before exhorting: "Don't let your work and hope be other than great." But like his great contemporary, Ian Hamilton Finlay, he was truly international in his outlook, his appeal, his vision, and he published translations of poetry in a score of languages.

The appeal of his work was broad and his readership spanned the generations. His poetry has long been taught in schools and in recent years he collaborated with the likes of Roddy Woomble and his band Idlewild. His honesty, his humour, his humanity and compassion enabled him to reach across any age gap. And his dazzling technique, the verbal pyrotechnics, were always in the service of something more, something deeper.

His love poems in particular ring in the heart as well as the mind – perfect little lyrics that resonate. This is all the more amazing since he revealed at the age of 70 that he was gay. It hadn't been too hard to work out! But in a country where homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1980, he had to be circumspect. In fact, perhaps it was the fact that the poems were coded that gave them their extra charge and intensity. They are in the moment, the specific place and time, and yet they are transcendent, timeless, universal.

I ended my own piece for Eddie@90 looking at my personal archive – all Eddie's books from these past 40 years (most of them signed), a couple of manuscripts, quirky handwritten postcards and revisiting it all with gratitude and love.

At this year's WORD Festival, in May, a few of the writers taking part read their favourite Edwin Morgan poems. I read a well-known piece called A View of Things. ("What I love about poetry is its ion engine.") And I wanted to read another but ran out of time. The one I'd chosen was Fires, a rare autobiographical poem about his childhood and his parents, recounting a happiness that was only a moment before being reduced to almost nothing. Then he ends, as only he could, with what seems to me a credo: The not quite nothing I praise it and I write it.

Alan Spence is one of Scotland's leading poets

THE GUARDIAN