Morrison's work belongs to no particular school, but owes some debt to fairly unconventional (and largely Scottish

Scottish people

The Scottish people , or Scots, are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically they emerged from an amalgamation of the Picts and Gaels, incorporating neighbouring Britons to the south as well as invading Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse.In modern use,...

) influences such as John Davidson

John Davidson (poet)

John Davidson was a Scottish poet, playwright and novelist, best known for his ballads. He also did translations from French and German...

 and Harold Monro

Harold Monro

Harold Edward Monro was a British poet, the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public....

, as well as Welsh poets Alun Lewis

Alun Lewis

Alun Lewis , was a poet of the Anglo-Welsh school, and is regarded by many as Britain's finest Second World War poet.- Education :...

 and Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

.

His work is often characterised by a strongly social and polemical tone, as epitomised in two of his long poems: Clocking-in for the Witching Hour (new revised edition, Smokestack 2010), which charts the thought processes of his father on a night shift

Shift work

Shift work is an employment practice designed to make use of the 24 hours of the clock. The term "shift work" includes both long-term night shifts and work schedules in which employees change or rotate shifts....

 as a security officer, through themes of ancestry and self-perceived failure; and the Blakeian Keir Hardie Street (new revised edition, Smokestack, 2010), in which a fictitious, turn-of-the-century, working-class poet discovers a Socialist Utopia

Utopia

Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

 off the dreamt-up Sea-Green Line of the London Underground

London Underground

The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...

.

Morrison’s work can also demonstrate an acute empathy

Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...

 for mental

Mind

The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

 suffering, as in his openly confessional piece Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever (2004), in which he traces the possible origins of his own obsessive preoccupations to a childhood

Childhood

Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...

 subtly punctuated by Catholicism.

Morrison’s most acclaimed work so far is Picaresque, a play for voices based on his experiences working at an all-male night shelter in Brighton

Brighton

Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...

, in which he juxtaposes the homeless "residents" with piratical alter-egos.