Edwin Morgan's prodigious talent has [in The Second Life] produced one of the most refreshing collections of poems I have read. They range in tone from light to serious, and from the real to fantasy. The book includes groups of experimental poems: some concrete poetry and some permutations on sounds and letters which produce fascinating results…. Included are some powerful poems in memory of Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, and Edith Piaf. But the major group of poems is linked to the title poem, and is mostly nightmare-fantasy or science fiction in which the author suddenly finds himself alive again, but with déjà vu. The theme here is renewal…. But this is renewal in a grotesquely possible world that makes this real one seem paradisical.

Thomas E. Luddy, in a review of "The Second Life," in Library Journal, Vol. 93, No. 14, August, 1968, p. 2882.