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Cathures is the earliest known name for Glasgow. This collection includes poems written by Morgan in his capacity as Glasgow's official Poet Laureate from 1999, reflecting the life of the city in both the present and the past.

Its scope is not limited to Glasgow: it also includes the impish sequence 'Demon' first published in 1999, and a piece commissioned and set by Swedish composer Stale Kleinberg in memory of the victims of Nazi persecution, which was performed in Trondheim Cathedral. Many of the poems allow characters to tell their own stories, including a long poem on the British theologian Pelagius and a description of the poet Robert Fergusson's arrival in the Edinburgh bedlam.

"The two slightly Tennysonian dramatic monologues that begin Cathures can be read as disguised imaginative autobiographies. In the first, 'Pelagius', the fourth-century British heretic and enemy of St Augustine articulates a determination, in spite of all his failures and enemies, to work for a brighter, less superstitious future … This is one Morgan, the singer of hymns to a bright humanism and a brighter future. In 'Merlin', both speaker and meaning are more hermetic … For a time, Merlin becomes a maddened solitary, so much in the company of a wolf that he too is made wolfish. Morgan can never decide whether he belongs alone in the fen or with the lutanist in the hall."

William Wooten, London Review of Books, 18 November 2004

A recording of Morgan reading the poem 'A Gull' included in Cathures can be found at www.poetryarchive.org

Cathures: New poems 1997-2001

2000s

Cathures is the earliest known name for Glasgow. This collection includes poems written by Morgan in his capacity as Glasgow's official Poet Laureate from 1999, reflecting the life of the city in both the present and the past.

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