In retrospect, the fact the event showcasing the work of the winners of The Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition occurred the evening before Mr Morgan's death at the age of ninety becomes an excellent tribute to the national makar, and certainly one of the greatest poets in Scottish history.

Competition judge Robert Crawford impresses us with an image of Mr Morgan's generosity to poets, particularly new poets. We hear the story of a rare (at the time) collection of poetry which Mr Morgan took from his bookshelf and gave to Crawford, then Morgan's student at the University of Glasgow, a book which remains one of his most valued possessions.

Competition judge Kathleen Jamie details the process of judging 800 poems. The two judges worked independently. Jamie tells us that she searched for work with urgency, something that 'had to be written'. The two judges reduced their pile of poems to twenty, then emailed the titles (submissions were judged anonymously) to one another. Fortunately the judges noticed many of the same poems, thus forming a long list.

Narrowing these down to a short list involved paper strewn across the floor, picking up poems repeatedly, reading aloud. I have an image of late evenings in a quiet flat, outside noise absorbed by the intricate task. Jamie mentions the high concentration of work coming from a small country, paying attention to language and truth. 'It's a good place to be', she tells us.

A. B. Jackson, first prize winner and NHS worker tells us that he often passes the Glasgow nursing home where Mr Morgan lived until yesterday. He reads his winning poem, written after returning from Shetland where he was delivering training to NHS employees, elated by the sheer fact of 'being somewhere nice'.

Jackson's descriptions are original. 'Post-dental mouth' strikes me as a daring use of language, the sort a lot of poets would write and then discard, but Jackson uses it well. He has a great sense of timing, pacing flawlessly before rattling the audience with lines like 'The air is a new drug.' I was less impressed with his love poems, which failed to stir me, than I was with his innovative sense of landscape and atmosphere.

Also adept at landscape and atmosphere is the second prize winner, Nick MacKinnon. His close-to-the-bone description of an adolescent affair in a remote stretch of land on the water is filled with echoes of the characters' lives. 'His tan is library-shadowed' paired with 'fingers adorned with ink stains from A-Levels' combines beautifully and jarringly with more overtly sexual physical descriptions. His description of a wedding twined with images of a hospital, a groom 'glistening with strippers' lipstick' and 'in-laws around the bed like hospital curtains' creates a scene both humourous and deadly. No subject is too weird for MacKinnon. He reads us a voyeuristic poem about a glass toilet and another about the mimicry of a squeaky pump by several generations of starlings.

The third prize winner, Marianne Burton, is unfortunately not present, but we hear work from two runners-up. Richard Lambert uses repetition to great effect in a poem which gradually builds in imaginative scope and lexis. His poems on the subject of love and eroticism are stirring, with sensitive descriptions of a woman dancing naked on a lawn at a party, and 'bruises on limbs from a night of love'. Lambert has a cool, even tone and a disciplined reading style which works well with his sparse language.

Susan Grindley, a landscape architect, reads us her poem 'Gobbie Deacon's Repost' inspired by Edwin Morgan's 'Opening the Cage'. Her use of vernacular is unusual and daring, and finds not beauty, exactly, but something raw and human in the simple, repetitive language. She reads with humour, is conversational and unpretentious. We hear a very effective childs-height description of a back garden and the small surrounding world, and an unexpected rescue by a neighbour who 'smells like beer and smoke'.

Out of the four poets who read their work, I'm most impressed with MacKinnon, for his original style, sense of timing, performance skills and manipulation of language which never falls flat.

Though the event was organised to showcase the work of the poets, the atmosphere hinged on the work of Mr Morgan and showed the great and unique regard in which the makar is held.