---

Programme Note

PROGRAMME NOTE

There is one unexpected pleasure taking the London Underground (and, more recently, also the New York City subway): one's eye may alight on a poem placed amongst the pervasive and numbing advertisements, and, for a moment, the imagination takes wing.

The poems selected for this work are all to be found in 100 Poems on the Underground. The first by Robert Herrick describes the dream world, the setting where the "wondrous sights" of the anonymous 17th century poem can be found. Fortunately the subway piranhas of Edwin Morgan's contemporary poem exist only in the imagination. However this poem, commissioned for the inauguration of Glasgow's refurbished underground, so alarmed the transport executive that it was never used!