Edwin Morgan's principal achievement in poetry has been to revive some of the modernist spirit of linguistic adventure and play, otherwise mostly defunct in Britain for several decades. His poems and translations demonstrate an excitement about the possibilities of poetic innovation, an excitement that has taken him into unusual experimental idioms. In the early 1950s his writing was influenced by British surrealism, by the romantic-symbolist modes of Dylan Thomas, and by science fiction, for which he has shown an abiding passion. Soon, however, he was to recognize strong affinities with American moderns such as William Carlos Williams, the Black Mountain poets, and the Beats. From their examples he was to learn a new creative freedom. In 1962 he discovered the Brazilian Noigandres group of "concrete" poets, and he began to create visual and phonic poems. His delight and energy in developing experimental methods and also in making a simpler...