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Find out moreJ.O. Morgan lives on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. He is the author of five collections of poetry, each a single book-length poem: Natural Mechanical (2009), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, its sequel, Long Cuts (2011), shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Award, At Maldon (2013), shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award, In Casting Off and Interference Pattern, shortlisted for the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Assurances is an award-winning narrative poem, a story, a collection of words that funnels thought, tightens feelings, allows and encourages consideration. Assurances with its mix of verse and unversed passages is a poem about the threat of nuclear war, it is shocking, yet also quite beautiful as it looks from sky to earth, from bottom to top, from small to global. I started to read, and found myself reading out loud, feeling each word, the placement, the power. If you love poetry, you may have already come across J. O. Morgan, if you are uncertain, if you aren’t sure if poetry is for you then do step inside, let the words connect, allow yourself to explore. I adore the ‘as with’ sections, the daily, known, ordinary, opening up and allowing understanding of the military might, the standoff, the forever nature of nuclear weapons. Assurances flows, breaks, breathes, wounds, hurts, it is 48 pages of provocative and powerful, do read it.
From the winner of the Costa Poetry Award A lone martian returns to Earth. He leaves behind him a hardened survivalist culture, its muddled myths and songs, its continued abuse of the environment that sustains it. During this journey back to the now-broken and long-abandoned mother planet, the martian begins to consider his own uncertain origins, and his own future. Cut off from his people, the martian's story is that of the individual: his duty at odds with his desire; the race of which he's still a part playing always on his mind, as well as the race that once was. This is the story of what life becomes when stripped of all that makes it worth living - of what humans become when they lose their humanity. The Martian's Regress is a brilliant, provocative, often darkly comic work that explores what a fragile environment eventually makes of those who persist in tampering with it.
Assurances is an award-winning narrative poem, a story, a collection of words that funnels thought, tightens feelings, allows and encourages consideration. Assurances with its mix of verse and unversed passages is a poem about the threat of nuclear war, it is shocking, yet also quite beautiful as it looks from sky to earth, from bottom to top, from small to global. I started to read, and found myself reading out loud, feeling each word, the placement, the power. If you love poetry, you may have already come across J. O. Morgan, if you are uncertain, if you aren’t sure if poetry is for you then do step inside, let the words connect, allow yourself to explore. I adore the ‘as with’ sections, the daily, known, ordinary, opening up and allowing understanding of the military might, the standoff, the forever nature of nuclear weapons. Assurances flows, breaks, breathes, wounds, hurts, it is 48 pages of provocative and powerful, do read it.
At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects - dualities, ambiguities, boundaries - through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference. This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact - depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions? Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.
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