environment and space 147The sequence includes gobbets of vernacular and references to
political unrest, and chronicles the impact of poor design on com-
munities. The opening sonnet maps out the state of condemned
tenement buildings: ‘Four storeys have no windows left to smash’
and an interior where ‘Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall’.^37
These, Morgan stresses, are inhabited buildings peopled by a
mother and daughter and a man who lies late ‘since he has lost
his job’ (p. 78 ). Glasgow Sonnets is a polyphonic text in that it is
multi-voiced, sampling speech and dialect. In the third sonnet
we encounter a landlord who is prepared to illegally rent ‘a hoose’
(p. 79 ) for £ 800. Morgan infuses the poem with Scots dialect, par-
ticularly in dialogue with the inhabitants whose spaces he depicts.
Empathetically, the poet urges in the second sonnet: ‘Don’t shine
a torch on the ragwoman’s dram? / Coats keep the evil cold out
less and less’ as well as sadly acknowledging that ‘The same weans
never make the grade’ (p. 78 ).
The urban spaces depicted in Glasgow Sonnets read as a complex
interplay between history and the present. Morgan readily evokes
literary history in his depiction of the streets, and makes compari-
sons between Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Glasgow 1960 ’ written in 1935
and seventies Glasgow. This extends the implications of economic
depression, and the poet in sonnet four questions the agency of
his own work. Using mock political rhetoric and aphorisms, and
paraphrasing The Communist Manifesto, Morgan’s speaker taunts
the city, its districts and himself:
So you have nothing to lose but your chains,
dear Seventies. Dalmarnock, Maryhill,
Blackhill and Govan, better sticks and stanes
should break your banes, for poets’ words are ill
to hurt ye. (p. 79 )The sequence questions the developers’ attempts at regeneration
and how a threatening exchange has occurred between labour
and leisure. In the background to Glasgow Sonnets is the Clyde
shipbuilders’ strike of 1972 , and the speaker poses that ‘We have
preferred / silent slipways to the riveters’ wit’ (p. 79 ). In shaping
the city, Morgan has little time for the gentrifi cation he associates