146 contemporary poetry
wake of changes in relationships between place, language, and
nationality, and an increased focus on the politics of gender and
sexuality in relation to the “place” of the body’ (p. 95 ). It is with
these issues in mind that we turn to the representation of the city
and its interaction with its inhabitants in poems by Edwin Morgan,
Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan.
SPACE, THE CITY AND THE POEM: EDWIN MORGAN,
KATHLEEN JAMIE AND PAULA MEEHAN
Edwin Morgan’s sequence of ten Petrarchan sonnets, entitled
Glasgow Sonnets, was published in 1972. As one of Morgan’s most
urban works, the sequence chronicles the consequences of mod-
ernisation in the city, the effects of planning upon social processes
as well as the decimation of large-scale heavy industries. In an essay
‘The Poet and the City’ the poet traces writers’ often ambivalent
relationships to the cityscape:
The city is just as capable of stirring a writer’s creative
imagination as the world of nature is, and this is true whether
the relations are positive or negative. It may well be that
the straightforward celebration of a city... will not so
easily achieve lift off in a doubtful and self critical age like
ours, but the complexities of reactions to cities, especially
in the last two centuries have initiated what is virtually a
new kind of urban writing, in heightened prose as well as
verse.^36Morgan draws attention to the work of nineteenth and early
twentieth-century writers’ responses to increased pressures of
modernisation upon the city. He cites Charles Dickens’s London,
Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo’s Paris, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
St Petersburg, as well as the futurist cities in the poetry of Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Tommasso Marinetti’s prose poems and Thea von
Harbou’s Metropolis ( 1926 ).
Morgan’s choice of the sonnet form creates a useful frisson
with his subject matter – as tradition jostles with urban decay.