Connected Works is an innovative composition, the first half consisting of poetry and the second of essays on related topics. The whole can be seen as a meditation on the idea of, and the need for, connection. One theme is the rejection of binary thinking. Both/and is preferred to either/or - as it says in A Journey to the Western Isles, the islands “are poetry and they are prose.”
Praise for Connected Works
“There is an old world sensitivity to these poems. We voyage out from England’s courtly shores, pausing by the poet’s family roots in the furthest Hebrides, and arc round and to and fro across the Great Atlantic to a New World, returning (as it were) on the sanctus bell of Eliot’s perpetual angelus.” - Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul, Poacher’s Pilgrimage and the poetry Collection, “Love and Revolution”
“Very few things in this world delight our interest as much as intersections, particularly those which shift and are porous - permeable to what we sometimes call ‘spirit.’ Or, as Andrew Morrison observes in this enchanting collection:
…our lives have purpose, meaning, value/but the meaning shifts as easily/ as light reflecting from this pond…
In this resplendent volume, we find ourselves at the intersection of poetry and prose, at the junction of language and the unspeakable. We find ourselves exploring the richness of place (Scotland, in particular), faith, and poetry. One could not ask for a better tour guide nor a more fascinating journey.” - James R. Dennis, award-winning author of Songs of Seven Days, Listening Devices, Correspondence in D Minor, and co-author of the novels of Miles Arcenaux
“Morrison elegantly weaves personal experiences, cultural reflections, and philosophical inquiries together in this collection. His nature descriptions are unique and evocative…a diverse and ambitious collection…” - Kirkus Reviews
“Mature, inspired and deeply thoughtful”
“Image-making is extraordinary”
— Jeffrey Levine, Founding editor, Tupelo Press
Andrew Morrison, Lord Dunrossil, has been writing poetry all his life.
At Oxford, he co-founded the Oxford Literary Society and ran its Poetry Workshop in the 1970s. His poems appeared in Oxford Poetry Now, along with work by WH Auden, Anne Stevenson, Ruth Padel, and others.
Publication was not pursued during his career in the commercial sphere, but more recently his poems have appeared in Acumen, a UK magazine, Voices, and in LOGOS, the magazine of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.
Morrison has been praised for having a very distinctive voice, quite different from so much that emerges out of modern American MFA courses. It differs both as a poetry of Ideas and for its use of form and sound.
Early influences were mostly the Modernists, Pound, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Later years have seen the influence of Larkin, Heaney and Robert Browning come to the fore, the latter both for his use of ordinary, conversational, speech and for his playful, even mischievous use of rhyme.