Edwin Morgan's Poems of Thirty Years is a curate's egg of a book. Large stretches of it are only intermittently comprehensible (e.g. 'The New Divan'), it contains a great deal of versified sci-fi which can be of interest only to aficionados of that genre, and a lot of the earlier verse verges on the worst kind of 1940s apocalyptic twaddle (it was I think a mistake to include the hitherto unpublished 'Dies Irae' of 1952). On the other hand, many of the poems display passion, wit and a desperately inventive verve which is very persuasive; Morgan is at his most impressive in parody and invective, as in the early 'Vision of Cathkin Braes' or the later 'Five Poems on Film Directors', and despite the omnivorous range of subjects he treats, this rather suggests a talent in search of a theme.

The last poem, 'Cinquevalli', is about a juggler...