One problem with participating in Reading Challenges, or with publicly sharing your #2020Reads is that you can start to believe the picture you're painting. This picture will probably portray you as the great explorer and this can be pleasing if you're vain enough (I'm vain enough). The picture will also be a lie. In presenting you as an explorer it will most likely erase all activity that complicates your trajectory to the point of incoherence. Stray poems, essays, comic strips - these will not necessarily trouble the picture you find yourself painting, and this absence should trouble you.

I can honestly say that I've read read this short collection of Edwin Morgan's poems from cover to cover, but if I had only read half that much its absence from the story I'm telling myself about what I've read this year would still be farcical.

Thankfully, the poems themselves serve as a counterweight to this sort of deceitful, ill-directed flattery. It would be impossible to make your way through this book and to feel that you had in any way completed it; with the wet concrete poems, it is sometimes hard to know whether you've even started. Elsewhere, Morgan allows himself to enjoy pure sound and science-fantasy, making it hard for the honest reader to pretend they've got a sense of his limits. The great thing about reading his poems in volume - if not necessarily in a *collected* volume like this one - is that all of these elements are inextricably linked to the world in which they were produced. From grim encounters on Glasgow Green to moments of tenderness in front of the TV by way of dubious offers of housing, Morgan's poetry is clearly the poetry of a life, written from the scattered positions it will most likely be read in.

Like your reading, it need not always fit together as part of a comprehensible story in order to feel whole.