45 Market Street
Thu 24 Sept · 18:30
24.09.26. 6.30–8pm An evening to discover and celebrate the incredible body of visual and sound poetry by Edwin Morgan, much of which is rarely seen and will now be available in this significant new volume from Reaktion Books. This new selection reveals Edwin Morgan’s groundbreaking multimedia poetics beyond his celebrated lyric voice. With editors Greg Thomas and Julie Johnstone, poets Iona Lee and Dan Power, and Morgan’s publisher, bibliographer and friend, Hamish Whyte. 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 sonic permutations. 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. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Greg Thomas is a writer, critic, poet and artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019) and has written extensively on visual and concrete poetries, text art and multimedia art. Julie Johnstone is an artist, curator, editor and publisher based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She works primarily in the artists’ book form and her bookworks are in numerous national collections. She was previously Head Librarian at the Scottish Poetry Library and established and curated the Edwin Morgan Archive held there. www.juliejohnstone.com Hamish Whyte was born in 1947 near Glasgow where he lived before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. A former librarian and Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Shoestring Press has published five collections, the latest being A Spell of Watching: New & Selected Poems (2024). HappenStance published a memoir, Morgan and Me, in 2020 and he edited Edwin Morgan: Centenary Selected Poems (2020) for Carcanet Press. For many years he was Edwin Morgan’s Scottish publisher, at the award-winning Mariscat Press. He has also compiled a bibliography of Morgan’s work. Iona Lee is a writer from Edinburgh whose work encompasses poetry, music, visual art, and live performance. She has read her work in venues and on festival stages all over the UK and Europe, from Shetland to Cornwall, Paris to Berlin, dive bars to the Royal Albert Hall. Her debut collection, Anamnesis (Polygon, 2023) won the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 2024 she published What I Love About A Cloud Is Its Unpredictability (Trickhouse Press) ̶ a collection of visual and concrete poetry created through interactions with the geolocation software what3words. Iona’s work is concerned with themes of magic, media, art and artifice, memory and other hauntings. Dan Power was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2024. His poems appear in Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Gutter, Magma, Wet Grain, and more. Dan is the founding editor of Trickhouse Press, a publisher specialising in visual poetry, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. His film poems have been exhibited at the Off-Page Vispo exhibition in 2025, Beaconsfield Gallery in London, and at StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. Dan can be found on Instagram @therealdanpower, or at danpower.xyz. Advanced reviews: 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 This eagerly awaited study is a veritable triumph. Greg Thomas’s fine introduction ranges seamlessly over the intricate details of Morgan’s multifaceted career as a poet. The decision to reproduce many of the poetic texts in the versions that Morgan himself devised enhances the book’s historical importance. Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol, and editor of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967) A Home in Space is a fantastic presentation of the extensive work of the Scottish visual/concrete poet Edwin Morgan. Greg Thomas and Julie Johnstone have created an artfully curated volume that showcases the many dimensions of Morgan’s practice – from his early scrapbooks through his explorations of typewriter, graphic, visual poetics in various media. Thomas’s initial essay situates Morgan’s work in the context of twentieth-century literary activity, making the case once and for all that visual poetry was a central – rather than marginal – component of modern aesthetics. For those unfamiliar with the poet, this is a terrific introduction and, for those already fans, the book is an opportunity to appreciate the range and variety of Morgan’s thought and expression. So much of his work is scattered and distributed in different venues and repositories and circulated in niche networks that the sheer effort of locating, selecting and collating this collection is admirable. It’s such a pleasure to see the combination of solid research and beautifully designed publication honouring Morgan’s creative spirit. Johanna Drucker, author of Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture (2025) and Inventing the Alphabet (2022) This is a marvellous book, revealing for the first time the full range of generous wit with which Edwin Morgan wrote radical new poetries. Here, indeed, are oodles of thrillingly self-estranging technical experiment and much avant-garde mischief. Drew Milne, Judith E. Wilson Professor of Poetics, University of Cambridge, and author of In Darkest Capital: Collected Poems
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.