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This expands Morgan's earlier Poems of Thirty Years (Carcanet, 1982), adding some fifty previously uncollected poems, and Themes from a Variation (Carcanet, 1988). The dates of its subtitle are themselves expanded by a poem from 1939, 'Sculpture', which acts as a prologue, and 'Seven Decades', written in 1990 and serving as an epilogue.

"His genius as a ventriloquist, which equips him to impersonate a prodigious range of men, gods, machines and monsters, has tended to obscure his own features to an extent that recalls the visor of the moon-walking astronaut, with its mirror-image of earth. (…) To assume so many shapes is to risk seeming wholly amorphous; but the charge of impersonality is largely contradicted by the more private lyrics that are clustered unobtrusively throughout the latter part of this volume."

Gerald Mangan, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Nov 1991

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Collected Poems 1949-1987

1990s

This expands Morgan's earlier Poems of Thirty Years (Carcanet, 1982), adding some fifty previously uncollected poems, and Themes from a Variation (Carcanet, 1988).

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