RESULTS

A Book of Lives draws together the themes that inform Morgan's poetic world. The largest vistas of human history, from twenty billion years BC to 9/11 and the 'war on terror'; Scotland from Bannockburn to the opening of the Scottish parliament. There are poems for birthdays and elegies that celebrate friends, while a dramatic dialogue about cancer sets personal experience in a wry evolutionary context. At the heart of the collection, a major sequence, 'Love and a Life', affirms the inextinguishable energies of love and art.

Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgamesh's quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and 'disappeared' political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester, and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss. Received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.