In one of the late poems included in this generous selection of his work, Frederick Morgan refers to 'life's daily chances.' Every preceding page in the book proves that from first to last, Morgan was fully alive to those chances and able to respond to them in ways that turned vigilance into a form of self-affirmation. In the more reserved formalities of his early work, and the comparative freedoms of his later poems, readers will find a consistently marvelous generosity of spirit-one that allows the work to explore personal matters as dexterously as it investigates matters in the wide public world. Epilogue may collect a lifetime's writing, and therefore inevitably contain a good deal of remembering, but one of its many distinctions is to retain a strong appetite for beginning-for seizing on those 'daily chances' and turning them into brightly-seen and durable actualities. -Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate (1999-2009)
Two features tie all the poems in Epilogue together: their limpidity of style and their tireless effort, through memory, dream, story, and fable, to tell the truth. The candid clarity of Morgan's voice, consistent through changes of experience and mood, is precisely what enables the poet and his readers to apprehend that truth.-Rachel Hadas, author of Poems for Camilla
This final work -not always 'safe for work'-reveals a poet still full of life, but a life 'faced as honestly as Morgan faces our morality,' notes David Mason in his insightful introduction. All the while, 'Morgan's poetic is that of an ordinary man, albeit a thoughtful and cultivated one, among other things a body in time.'-James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion
