EDWIN MORGAN

POETRY AWARD
2020
 EDWIN MORGAN
POETRY AWARD
2020

Judges
John Glenday & Kathleen Jamie
© the contributors 2020
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INTRODUCTION
If Edwin Morgan (1910–2020) had been able to foresee – by
virtue of some poetic sixth sense – that the centenary of his
birth would coincide with a global pandemic, I have no doubt
that his famous typewriter would have been clattering away.
It is difficult to say for sure what kind of poem might have
emerged, although we have some clue in the remarkable one
he wrote in response to his own cancer diagnosis, ‘Gorgo and
Beau’. This features a dialogue between a healthy human cell
and a cancerous one. While it bears all the marks of Morgan’s
customary ingenuity and wit, it is a deeply serious reflection
on human resilience and suffering, both of which have been
so conspicuously on display, especially in the NHS and in care
homes where Morgan himself spent the last years of his life. At
the heart of ‘Gorgo and Beau’ there is a meditation on both the
power and the hazards of communication. Just as human cells
communicate with each other, not always effectively or benignly,
so human beings and societies may be both the beneficiaries
and the victims of systems of communication that require care
and consideration.
Care, and the communication of that care, is at the heart of
poetry. It is not surprising how many of us have turned recently
– as so often before in moments of crisis – to the healing and
invigorating space of poetry, which seems to be present in
the media at large as never before. One of the things poetry
understands is how important language is in the way we care
for and communicate with others. I believe that it was that
deep empathy that spurred Morgan on to become a poet of the
greatest imaginative compass, ever ready to test older forms
and to innovate with the aim of moving the greatest number of
people out of complacency and into discovery. He would have
seen the pandemic as a challenge and he would have wanted
poetry to be at the forefront of attempting to meet it. The health
crisis has displaced many of the more conventional celebrations
planned to mark Morgan’s centenary but he would not have
been disappointed if it means that the focus on poetry itself –
his poetry and that of the young poets featured in this booklet
– is intensified. For it is those careful and caring words that
matter above all else.
It is the mission of The Edwin Morgan Trust to care for Morgan’s
legacy, both poetic and financial, and its main function is to
curate the biennial award for young poets under the age of
thirty. Morgan believed that it is by investing in the young
that we can best care for the future. The selection made by
judges Kathleen Jamie and John Glenday in this centenary
year again bear witness to that act of faith. All the collections
submitted for consideration were judged anonymously and
the poems presented here for the first time are among those
that particularly impressed the judges. The Trust is grateful to
Kathleen and John for the time and consideration given to the
large number of collections submitted and for their words of
evaluation and appreciation. All of these poems were written
and submitted before the pandemic took hold but each one,
in its own way, speaks to the present moment and to the way
poetry can enable us to care more effectively for language and,
through it, for others.
The Edwin Morgan Poetry Award remains the most important
way we have of celebrating Morgan’s achievement. Other
centenary celebrations – a suitably diverse array – have
been diverted for the time being onto virtual platforms
and we hope that readers will not hesitate to head over to
edwinmorgantrust.com to sample their riches.
David Kinloch
— Chair, The Edwin Morgan Trust
THE SHORTLIST
COLIN BRAMWELL is a poet, performer and musician from
the Black Isle. His first pamphlet of poems will be published in
early 2021 by Stewed Rhubarb Press. Currently, he is working
towards a PhD in Scots and literary translation at the University
of St Andrews.
MICHAEL GRIEVE lives in Fife where he works as a bookseller.
He is a graduate of the universities of St Andrews and Cambridge,
and his work has appeared in The Scores, Magma, and Perverse.
His pamphlet Luck is published by HappenStance.
KIRSTEN KERR is a Glasgow-based poet, originally from
Aberdeen. Writing about people, nature and place, her poetry
often returns to that wee glint of magic in the everyday.
DAVID LINKLATER is a poet from Balintore (Balti/The Bleaching
Town) in Easter Ross. His work has appeared in Gutter, Glasgow
Review of Books, DMQ Review and SPAM, amongst others. His
pamphlet Black Box is published by Speculative Books. He lives
and writes in Glasgow.
PAUL MALGRATI is a Glasgow-biding poet from France, writ-
ing verse in Scots and French. He recently completed a PhD
in Scottish literature at the University of St Andrews and now
works within the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the Uni-
versity of Glasgow. In 2019, his first poems appeared in several
magazines and books, including The Darg. 
ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED is the author of two pamphlets, Hinge
(ignitionpress) and Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press).
Her work can be found in The Paris Review Daily, Guernica
Magazine, The Poetry Review, and others. Alycia is the co-
founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network. 
STEWART SANDERSON is a poet from Glasgow, currently based
in the West Midlands, where he works as a local authority Arts
Development Officer. The recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, as
well as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jessie Kesson Fellowships,
his most recent pamphlet is An Offering (Tapsalteerie, 2018).
 THE JUDGES

The 2020 judges are the award-winning poets John Glenday,

whose poetry collections include The Apple Ghost, Grain and,
POEMS
most recently, The Golden Mean; and Kathleen Jamie, whose by the shortlisted poets
poetry collections include the Saltire Book of the Year The Bonniest
Companie, The Overhaul and The Tree House, and whose prose
publications include Sightlines and most recently, Surfacing.

JUDGES’ COMMENT

‘Push the boat out compañeros,

push the boat out, whatever the sea.’

This is a particularly important year for the Edwin Morgan

Poetry Award. Not only is it Morgan’s centenary year (we would
have loved to read the poem he would have written for that, as
he did for his eightieth!) but it is also a year of unprecedented
global challenge. So it is doubly relevant that we remember
Morgan’s bequest was designed to encourage young talent to
blossom. The difficulties of today mean we will need the poets
of tomorrow, as never before.

A great many manuscripts are submitted for the Edwin Morgan

Poetry Award. The majority don’t make the grade – mainly
because they are too busy lecturing the reader, often loudly,
forgetting that the poem should be listening to language, and led
by it, more than merely employing it as a tool.

But talent will out. There were enough which deserved a second
or third reading, some beginning quietly and growing in strength,
others suggesting their authority from the start. All the writers
represented here are young – all have careers ahead of them. We
are delighted to have discovered these collections, and we believe
that Edwin Morgan, he of the boundless enthusiasm, would have
delighted in them too. They stand as proof that poetry in Scotland
is thriving, increasingly diverse and eager to address whatever
challenges might lie ahead.
COLIN BRAMWELL
The Lost Elephant
For a childhood toy, mislaid in Ayrshire at a young age,
and forever lost after moving to the Black Isle
Dream that I have lost you in my home.
On the cold march further northwards now,
I cross another mountain pass alone.
Elephants of cotton have been known
to hide in cupboards when it’s time to go.
Dream that I have lost you in my home
for I was two. You were my homophone.
Distant headlights moving fast and slow
crossed another mountain pass alone.
Then you show up, your fur the colour of stone.
I could have sworn that you were all pink though.
Dream that I have lost you in my home
then wake to find you, marching out for Rome.
Promise me that you will leave your shadow
and cross another mountain pass alone
your soft back shrugging off the soldier’s throne.
Another homesick soldier in the snow
dreams that I have lost you in my home.
Cross another mountain pass alone.
COLIN BRAMWELL
Epilogue
After Norman MacCaig
The real gift of a floating-off balloon
is in the action it necessitates:
the looking up, the wave, the see-you-soon,
the passive world the child reanimates.
The red without which blue cannot be known
to blue surrenders. In this act of sinking,
one beloved thing is lost in time.
Better not to turn what’s gone to stone:
not to write what one ought to be thinking;
there is better refuge in the unknown.
The jigsaw sinks, the sea around it doesn’t.
The sky is what it keeps, although it isn’t.
We are made of what we have forgot.
Memory’s like that, except it’s not.
MICHAEL GRIEVE
Bonnygate
for A
Here, in our first, high-ceilinged flat
with a view over the main drag, where gate
has no sense of boundary but of way,
and where street noises – the first rush of the day,
and the fighting and singing of drunks – become
the murmur that we live against. Every home
we live in in our lives will have started here,
where on the first warm day of the year
we jammed a knife into the painted sash
to raise it up, only for its breezy crash
an hour later to send this hairline crack
across the corner of a pane. We lack
the wherewithal to have it mended,
and lifting the sash, I am reminded
of how our brittle clarities are prone
to come apart, and of how this alone
could undo anything: our rattled frame,
the house that frames it, and the ancient name
framing the house. I am reminded, too,
of how time shows herself in residue,
then patina, then dereliction;
the gradual dust and gradual action
of mould in the break. I set in place
our half-repair, a hinge with which we brace
the sash, and listen as dusty air
breathes freely through the room. A pair
of passing children tiff; a scaffolder
completes the job. When we are older
and have, I hope, moved on, continued loving,
and when these noises fade to almost nothing,
listen – is the River Eden running?
MICHAEL GRIEVE
On First Looking into Emily Wilson’s Homer
If I have ever heard this told before
I swear my ears must have been plugged with wax,
or else I was distracted by a roar
of wind that carried off the tune. The backs
of all those weighty books are broken,
their pages foxed and scattered to the seas
where the loose weft of their rhythm slackens
and I lose the thread of their grand odysseys.
But here, at last, the story’s homing in,
with its lines taut enough to fire an arrow
and woven close enough to catch a wind
and cut across the foam. I am no hero
but I hear the song and taste salt on my lip.
Tie me to the spine of this great ship.
KIRSTEN KERR KIRSTEN KERR

A Dunnock, Harvest-time Scarecrow

Wheat emblazons your eye I was a bird then. Feathered

until mine falls through among other things

flexing when I would slip

my own skin
what’s in your sight to gold for the flight of it and peel
thinking for a moment from this earth to the next,

I know what you see the current of my veins

but I don’t. wind-driven, northwesterly
un
clipped. I knew

the very tips of the pine trees.

My beak sharp,
my wing beat was flint spark.

Now I am fright
like the greedy hand that dips
warm and strange into the nest.
DAVID LINKLATER DAVID LINKLATER

Pilgrim Territories Lapwing

After Morris Grassie, ‘The Sou’westers, Arbroath’, c.1957 ‘Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come
Since I first left home’
— Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, ‘Brokedown Palace’
Hard work, my father taught the meaning.
Oily tracks on his palms handed down
from his father and his father before him. Today staring at the blankness
Artisans of the Firth, casting, hauling buoys thinking of what you would have done with it.
rolling in kicks. Mind Finlay and Big Dick, old boys
out to catch the elusive thing, and no one knew what it was? The sky is on a different level.
The Dawn, The Marigold Daughter that cut through waves Each sentence has a missing word.
rearing up with white hooves on cold mornings,
foam buckshot from a magnificent shotgun, Your head-back laugh, thunderous thigh-clap
the clouds raging bulls – gone to memory that meant you got it right
with the men that sailed them. Other times and I’ve never seen anyone
sea smooth as a glass disc, Bottlenoses doing make clothes bloom like that.
their silken dance, knowing to steer clear of Will Pat
and the boys out there netting the great blueness. Green lady, you Lapwing,
Once a shadow moved under the boat and it was like you leap with a flicker in it,
God finally spoke, and bells tolled through mist. go about your business.
Making it yield, a life passed down. Fingers Find outlines and put colour there.
a thousand tides deep, gutting the silver skinned
chromosomes, keeping it all singing. I picked up tradition Your name in italics, Peach-faced Lovebird,
as if it were a shoe and tried some others in my time red hair from a red beret
but my body is water and I wear it like the seabed. leaving the brokedown palace.
With my sou’wester yellow as a pale sun, I’ll be gone.
And when I come home, wash the salt and oil Away, out into the air
from the divots of my skin, sand will flash from the basin, where there is no end to any of it.
punctures in the night. The buoys out there plain-faced.
I could not for the life of me know a world on land. So many leaves are falling.
Go and be with them.
PAUL MALGRATI
Eden-upon-Tay
Hae ye luved in the wey that we luved,
at the birk, by a quirk o oor hert,
when the mirk o the gloamin had sprang
fae balustrades we swung, ‘tween the firth
an the glacier that loomed upon us;
hae ye, o, hae ye luved in that wey,
in the wey that Ah mean, aboon men
an their siccar defeat, aboon luvers
an their bidie-in despair o dawn,
in the wey that Ah mean, at the birk,
when we cuidnae abide by this warld
an abolisht its pride in a drouth
o messiahs an kisses ayebidin;
afore fear, an the rain, an the fall?
PAUL MALGRATI
Forêt de Fontainebleau
18 Januar 1553
Bairnheid o Mary Stuart
Mither, dear mère; dinnae, please, dinnae switch it aff;
keep a dim licht ‘tween ma lips an the daurk.
Please, dinnae – Ah wad aye kiss masel, lucid in
sicht o ma sowl, hauf-lit, afore sleep.
Mither, dear Marie – like me – dinnae turn ‘roon an
leuk at me, parfaite an prood, in ma bed,
Stuart-like an bound fir tae reign the morra when Ah
wake fae camsterie an gowsterie dreams.
Maman, maman, maman, abide by me,
breathe wi me, stiff thro the daurk webs o pooer;
ye an yer curls, electric an wireless, sae
passée in yer pyjamas o auld queen.
Mère dear, please; bide a while an leuk at
me, yer bairn, gey bold tho
feart – for she hears her ain sel in the gloom
an black mares a-trottin.
ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED

House of Prayer Origin of Water

I walk into the beads of thirty-three alhamdulillahs, as a child she wore a skirt of seagulls and was afraid
I walk into my childhood mouth, repeat alhamdulillah. of the dark called her mother god because

Four decades ago, father too walked into this prayer, what else could mother an ocean but god? she ate
his body nested in the oblong Boeing, his alhamdulillah nankhatai and plaited her hair she smelled of fennel

humming deep until it matched the scale of the engine.

seed newly crushed and scattered. she split into spring’s
It was during that first crossing from one alhamdulillah
tulips carried a jar of condolences just in case.
to another home, that my father crushed open the chasm
he has since passed down to every poem I write: [ ] she was a daughter caught praying in the mountains.
she was stone through stone melodic a vase of trees
the hollow, the forgotten Qur’an lodged deep in the night
of an unopened drawer. My quest to belong. Alhamdulillah, rattled by her name: water like the roots that hold
the earth together like ginan
forgive me, forgive me. I praise once again, I symmetry
like the wings of a migrating bird, I repeat alhamdulillah and its woven stanzas. she is the sound of a
messenger calling for another bird another
and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat, like the rokrok
of an egret. I hold this tasbih to count my alhamdulillahs
metaphor for god as a child, how was she to know
thirty-three times, ninety-nine times: the key is to walk what to call beloved?
again and again into the holy, repeating alhamdulillah,

alhamdulillah, alhamdullilah, until the skyward calm. Father,

what did you hope for when you uttered alhamdulillah,

when you rinsed over the Atlantic in that giant bird?

When the egg cracked open and the yolk of alhamdullilah

spilled onto a new coast? Was it travelling homeward

or away from homeland? I have learned that alhamdulillah

does not resemble a border, but it is a house of its own.

Alhamdulillah glints beyond language: praise be to God.

My western tongue holds the syllables, unhooks the praise in

my own last name: h-m-d. Always, I recite alhamdulillah.
STEWART SANDERSON
Pictish
Listen to the wind
where this language was –
the whisper as it passes
through the long
grass at St. Vigeans,
the leaves at Aberlemno.
Read on past the pause
where its king list
ebbs away into the waters
of a new tongue: so the river
Ewe runs downhill
towards its sea loch.
Reach out and touch
the topsoil to which
its syllables remain
attached: an anchor
lodged in sand years after
the ship has rotted.
Throw one last log
on the fire as you pronounce
their names – Nechtan and Brude,
Drostan and Drest – then let
them blend like smoke does
with the midnight air.
STEWART SANDERSON
Tynsale
‘The losing (of possessions, etc.); loss, destruction,
harm, detriment.’
— Dictionary of the Scots Language
A term for when the tin’s been sold
and all the tinsel taken down –
for when we feel a tingling cold
or find a shot stag’s hollow crown
out on the moor, then count the tines
to tell how many years have blown
past while it wandered in the pines
and windy places, where our lack
takes solid form: a wall which dwines
by increments into the slack
ground by a freshly-planted wood
of firs, spread like a dark-green crack
through fields where people’s houses stood.
Tynsale: a word we’re losing now
as language thins; a word which could
come back, perhaps, teaching us how
to talk about what’s happening
and as we walk into the lowe
of our own tynsale, find something
to sing about, be it so small
as this one word, which we let ring
despite the bleakness of it all.
JUDGES’ COMMENTS ON THE RUNNER-UP
COLIN BRAMWELL  ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
Jigsaw
In Jigsaw, the separate poems interlock as perfectly as the
puzzle itself. The conceit of jigsaw pieces runs through the
collection, images and landscapes reoccur from poem to poem
but there is nothing overworked or artificial about this – the
conceit is nothing more than a vehicle for the real puzzle: the
mysterious, interlocking dynamics of life.
Colin Bramwell manages to combine meticulous attention
to craft with a love of language and a delightfully irreverent
humour. A disruption can be parochial – Ayrshire to the Black
Isle; a loss can be small – a favourite long lamented toy, but
in these poems we recognise the local as universal. Though its
intentions remain serious throughout because a genuine poetic
intelligence is at work, the collection is also formally playful.
What a celebration and selection we are offered. Bramwell
masters everything from the prose poem to the villanelle to
daring, accumulative poems; there are snatches of dramatic
verse and witty tilts at the Scottish character. There are even
remarkable open translations into Scots from Latin American
and Chinese poets.
All these pieces fit together into a wry cohesive whole which
even when complete, remains a puzzle.
JUDGES’ COMMENTS ON THE Winner
 
The Ghosts that Visit Us as We Dream
When we first read Alycia Pirmohamed’s submission, we felt a
sense of relief that, whatever else might come, this manuscript
at least deserved further attention. It stood out immediately, not
only because the work is so compelling but because it seemed
to be opening up a new front in Scottish poetry; its message
was immediate and necessary and relevant, and one which is
becoming ever more important in our twenty-first-century world.
These varied, tender poems respond to Alycia’s experience
of her cultural background; their lovely specific imagery
and exciting diction arises from places as diverse as Dar Es
Salaam, Saskatchewan and Scotland. Though the poems are
luxuriant, with rich long lines, and surprising similes, they are
not picture-postcards. They feel like genuine poems, resulting
from direct pressure on the poet as she makes sense of her life
and celebrates the world being various. She controls vibrant
language with a formal precision and focus, creating an original
and illuminating world.
There is a genuine sense that the poems had to be written, as
loving explorations of those profound human concerns: place,
family, women’s heritage, language, loss and gain. They lead us
on a journey through the poet’s life, family, and heritage, which
somehow, in the process, informs our lives too.
At Eighty

Push the boat out, compañeros,

push the boat out, whatever the sea.
Who says we cannot guide ourselves
through the boiling reefs, black as they are,
the enemy of us all makes sure of it!
Mariners, keep good watch always
for that last passage of blue water
we have heard of and long to reach
(no matter if we cannot, no matter!)
in our eighty-year-old timbers
leaky and patched as they are but sweet
well seasoned with the scent of woods
long perished, serviceable still
in unarrested pungency
of salt and blistering sunlight. Out,
push it all out into the unknown!
Unknown is best, it beckons best,
like distant ships in mist, or bells
clanging ruthless from stormy buoys.

Edwin Morgan
The Edwin Morgan Trust was established in 2012 to carry
forward the wishes of the Scottish poet laureate, Edwin Morgan
(1920–2010). In particular, he wanted to found a new award
for young Scottish poets. Throughout his life, Morgan worked
to encourage and support young people and their writing. He
did this as a university teacher and through his many visits
to schools to give readings from his work. His poetry was and
remains widely taught. A prolific poet and translator, he was in
his forties before making his first real breakthrough, and often
remembered the problems young poets can have in getting a
first collection published. So when he came to gift his estate
to the nation and good causes, he stipulated that there should
be a new prize in his name awarded regularly for a collection
of poems by a Scottish poet under the age of thirty. The Edwin
Morgan Poetry Award is made biennially. The sum of £20,000
is awarded for the best unpublished collection of poems by
a Scottish or a Scotland-based poet aged 30 or under. The
runner-up receives £2,500 and other shortlisted poets £1,000.
It maintains an anonymous submission process.

This pamphlet has been published for free distribution while

supplies remain available. Please contact The Edwin Morgan
Trust to obtain copies.

Images of Edwin Morgan’s Scrapbooks are included with thanks

to Archives & Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
2020