By addressing in its first and last lines the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, whose Divan is one of the classics of that country, and maintaining a periodic dialogue with him, 'The New Divan', Edwin Morgan's ambitious and sometimes historical, sometimes pre-historical and futuristic 1970s poem sequence centring on his 1940s wartime service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Middle East, extends a flexible time-frame to contrast wealth and poverty across age-old and continuing subjection of the many by the few: Thousands are in hunger, see no glory, and all are in desire so great and ancient nothing heaven brings round, nothing behind or present or to come can fill their house with what they feel they need, or quieten them.[1] Repressive violence figured on antique stonework read as 'a grand inverse foreboding | of running feet under redder skies' (CP,p.302) connects with desert ruins seen in a snow-storm: a 'dangerous | place without hope | that anyone millenium-old in the sleet who | glistened there was glazed with | the peace of the grave or any human trust' (CP,p.305); and forward to images from living memory of 'people | [. . .] running down the world's roads among | columns of smoke, with no more belongings than | a back can take'. Charred bodies now compose a seemingly endless 'braille conducting | us silently from country to country | to country to country' (CP,p.316). Across its unfolding narration a shifting 'I' speaking sometimes in a remembering present, sometimes of a remembered past, sometimes in speculative temporalities, now mourns the death of a child, now recalls a son's behaviour, celebrates now a marriage, now homoerotic desire in a monastery. Dissolving conventions of character and narrative time, and so reading more like a postmodern fantasia on traditional form, 'The New Divan' tangentially preserves classic dimension and epic scope in a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end; in the sequence's extended memory and vision; its warfare, journeyings, feastings, arrivals, and departures; its ironized gestures to transcendent belief systems and its inclusions of future event as speculative (and sometimes radioactive) possibility: 'ships like peacocks | spread vanes near Mars, wear out, are souvenirs. | Their very scrap's too active yet by half' (CP,p.304). In a 1995 lecture Morgan described Wolfgang Iser's inclusion of narrative indeterminacies as an enabling condition for the 'constitution of an imaginary object during the act of reading': Iser is not saying that the reader can fill in the blanks with anything he likes, in jumping from one section to another, but that the author should [. . .] be tempting the reader to sniff the air between the sections and relate this to the atmosphere of other sections or of the whole work.[2] A 'ruffian sage' in poem 68 continuing his tale over a long night's drinking begun in poem 67 embeds and connects storytelling in self-reflexive ways: 'space arches, | I call them, the continuum's different, | thinner', and the sequence grew as it was written: I spent almost the whole of the war in the Middle East and got to know something about their arts, and this word Divan is used by them in ways not common with us. From its meaning as couch or sofa, the same word is also used for a council chamber. And the other meaning is a collection of poems. It's the same word and comes from the same meaning in that the poems are all sitting talking together, as it were, in these collections. They can sit where they like on these sofas, these divans, but there's something going on between each of these poems, there's some kind of mysterious conversation going on between them.[3] 'I think my attitude,' he said on another occasion, 'is not one of theory [. . .] so much as one of practice.'[4] Theories assumed into the structural practices of 'The New Divan' and subsequent poem sequences connect Iser with textual elements that Salman Rushdie over a decade after the publication of Morgan's complete poem would be describing as constitutive of narrative itself in the new dispensations of post-modernity: 'hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. …