Contemporary Poetry

148 contemporary poetry

with ‘Environmentalists, ecologists / and conservationists’, who
are described as ‘fi ne no doubt. / Pedestrianization will come out
/ fi ghting’ (p. 80 ). He also laments the nondescript homogenisa-
tion of suburban areas which, treated by the ‘sandblaster’s grout’,
create ‘pink piebald facades’ that ‘pout’ at ‘Mock-Venetianists’
(p. 80 ). Space here becomes a simulation of building styles,
design and textures that fabricate a past with no historical
authenticity.
Midway in the sequence Morgan alerts us that the heavy indus-
try has been supplanted by another, if remote, powerhouse. The
amorphous but economically powerful space of the North Sea oil
strike, while tilting ‘east Scotland up’, leaves the ‘great sick Clyde’
shivering in its bed (p. 80 ). In building roads around the city,
the constructors give Glasgow’s inhabitants a raw urban beauty:
‘fl yovers breed loops of light in curves’ (p. 81 ). Yet, in the fi nal
sonnet this position of oversight upon the city space is associated
with confi nement, atrophy and immobility. In a block of fl ats built
to replace the tenement building we witness a schoolboy reading
from Shakespeare’s King Lear: at the ‘thirtieth fl oor windows at
Red Road / he can see choughs and samphires, dreadful trade’
(p. 82 ). Morgan evokes the samphire gatherers’ dangerous work to
evoke the modern constricted space, which becomes an incarcera-
tion of ‘gentle load of souls in clouds’ and the fl ats themselves are
described as intimidating ‘monoliths’ (p. 82 ). For Morgan these
vertical sites offer no immediate social space and only that of
‘stalled lifts generating high-rise blues’; this perched immobility
and restriction generates ‘stalled lives’ which ‘never budge’ (p. 82 ).
In this fi nal image, Morgan’s sequence reiterates Lefebvre’s belief
that space is a contested site of power relations. The philosopher
proposes:

(Social) space is a (social) product... the space thus pro-

duced also serves as a tool of thought and of action... in

addition to being a means of production it is also a means of

control, and hence of domination, of power.^38

As suggested by Davidson, the ‘spatial turn’ during the latter
part of the twentieth century is often accompanied by an increased