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Alan Morrison is one of the very few poets to have tackled mental health in poetry. His poem shows both his erudition and his talent, blended in a Heraclitean flux, and this publication puts him in the very front rank of poets writing today.
Barry Tebb

This is an ambitious poem with a profoundly complex vision attached to it. The first impression the poem makes on you is that it brilliantly moves through a labyrinth of history, paradox and metaphor. It does not stop with the brilliance though. It works like a postmodern allegory where history meets the present and adulthood encounters childhood. The “dragons” are captive but on the way to liberation, and the liberation is both a social and a spiritual one. Poetry’s original function is that it must be heard even when it is read; when you’re reading Captive Dragons you’re constantly haunted by the Joycean music in the way the words occupy space with the intensity and speed of a giant machine or a terminator but somewhere despairingly aware of its human self. It’s a poem that demands the sustained involvement of the reader to appreciate the power of invention and experience the adventure of captivity and liberation.
Prakash Kona

Captive Dragons /

The Shadow Thorns

138pp, perfect bound paperback
Waterloo Press, Sep 2011
part-funded by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
ISBN 978-1-906742-39-3
www.waterloopress.co.uk

From 2008 to 2011, Morrison was poet-in-residence and voluntary poetry workshop facilitator at Mill View psychiatric hospital in Hove. His workshops provided a neutral creative space for inpatients to explore poetry and proved remarkably popular, many citing them as an essential weekly ‘lifeline’ contributory to their recoveries. In 2009, Morrison and Lead Activities Facilitator Nick McMaster secured a Sussex Partnership NHS Trust Arts Award to fund a publication of the distinctive writing produced through the workshops: the reversible double-anthology The Hats We Wear/ Blank Versing the Past (Waterloo, 2009/2010) resulted. Morrison was then commissioned to write his own poetic response to his residency, the key work of which is the epic title poem Captive Dragons, a Laingian testament to the vastly nuanced, historically obfuscated subject of ‘mental illness’; its personal and social aetiologies, private and public implications, and the stigmas still tacitly attached to it today. Morrison’s core dialectical motif is the ancient phrase Here Be Dragons, once used on old maps to warn of possible dangers in unexplored regions: Morrison juxtaposes this with the relatively unmapped right hemisphere of the human brain, thought to be the source of not only psychiatric pathologies, but also the primal creative impulses which hold promise for their future illuminations.

Alan Morrison has written the ultimate spearheading long poem
to defend poetic reality, often clinically diagnosed as madness, but in fact pushing dimensions out into the retrieval of a reclaimed poetics.
In a brilliantly impacted, rich diction fused to a profoundly humanitarian sensibility, he has succeeded in writing the most sustained poem about crossing frontiers of altered consciousness that I personally have encountered. He deserves our thanks.
Jeremy Reed

‘Here be dragons of the head’s uncharted territories’ writes Alan Morrison in Captive Dragons, an extraordinary study of the ‘penned dragons, captive dragons ...neither frightening nor fire-breathing’
who inhabit the wild edges of our societies. Morrison writes in a rich, rhetorical Miltonic voice, heavy with anger and prophecy. Exploring
the world of mental health, he ends up writing about the mental
health of our world, and the real dragons of our time — bankers, politicians, speculators — who lay waste to everything they touch. Magnificent stuff.
Andy Croft

The Shadow Thorns are wonderfully sinuous and startling.
Steven O’Brien
The London Magazine