Edwin Morgan maintains that poetry should "acknowledge its environment." Over the last 300 years Glasgow poets have done just that, responding to the life around them, to the changing
face and condition of the city, even campaigning for change themselves: from the elegant 18th-century merchant town, through the violent effects of the Industrial Revolution, to the social
optimism of the present era. In Mungo's Tongues, weavers, shoemakers, booksellers, housewives, pedlars, paupers, teachers, and not forgetting anon, all give voice to the lives and
times of a great city, and give testimony to its variety and energy.
