Critical Perspective on Mick Imlah

Some months ago, shortly after the poet Mick Imlah sadly passed away and his excellent collection The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize, I mentioned that I had written a piece for a profile of his work due to appear on the Contemporary Writers website. A few Wasteland readers expressed an interest in reading this piece, and as unfortunately it won't now appear, I thought I'd include it here instead. I hope it gives a flavour of Imlah's work, of which I'm a big fan, and encourages those not familiar with both of his collections (the aforementioned Faber volume and his first book, Birthmarks, published in 1988) to search them out.


Mick Imlah: A Critical Perspective


Alongside Michael Hofmann’s Nights in the Iron Hotel, Mick Imlah’s Birthmarks (1988) is perhaps the most original debut poetry collection of the 1980s: witty, irreverent and often darkly comic, its poems tread a line between the stylistically prosaic and the syntactically inventive and, in many instances, reveal an impressively unique music. As Neil Corcoran noted when reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘unusually for a first volume of poems, Birthmarks sounds distinctly like itself’, and it is certainly true that the collection resists comparison to much contemporary, even modernist, verse: in many respects, Imlah’s influences are Victorian. This is evident in his Tennysonian mastery of rhyme, rhythm, assonance and alliteration, as in ‘Silver’ (‘in block or chain / [it] Will not sustain / The nameless slaves / Who row it through the waves // As long as the old, crude / Hallmark tattooed / On every chest / Proclaims them second-best’), but more specifically in poems such as ‘Tusking’, a deft exploration of colonialism that, in its African setting of an imagined elephant hunt, ironically recalls the imperialistic works of Kipling:

‘In Africa once
A herd of Harrow
Elephants strayed
Far from their bunks;
Leather, they laid
Their costly trunks
And ears of felt
Down on the Veldt.

All forgot
The creep of dusk;
A moonbeam stole
Along each tusk:
Snores and sighs.
Oh, foolish boys!
The English elephant
Never lies!’

As is characteristic of Imlah’s work, this wry and knowing humour rises through the registers (in this case, to a suggestive yet starkly vivid description of the dead creatures: ‘Out in the bush / Is silence now: / Savannah seas / Have islands now, / Smelly land-masses, / Bloody, cold, / Disfigured places / With fly-blown faces’), ending with a subtle commentary on post-colonial guilt: the ‘tinkle of ice [in whisky] and Schubert’ being played on an ivory-keyed grand piano, intoning: ‘Pity the hulks! / Play it again!’. As its title suggests, then, Birthmarks relishes in exploring the complex issues surrounding (and intertwining) our origins, identities and wider history, and does so with both ingenuity and sharp intelligence. In poems such as ‘I Have a Dream’ and ‘Cockney’, for instance, Imlah’s use of narrative and dramatic monologue (a form he frequently adopts, bringing to mind another Victorian poet, Robert Browning), serves to cunningly question received ideas on race and class respectively, but also to demonstrate his gift for demotic speech and an eye for the contemporary. In ‘Goldilocks’, a university lecturer finding a homeless Scottish man in his bed makes for a particularly well-drawn character:

‘Now I’m keen for us all to be just as much worse as we want,
In our own time and space – but not, after midnight, in my bed;
And to keep his inertia at bay, I went for the parasite,
Scuttling him off with a shout and the push of a boot

That reminded his ribs I suppose of a Maryhill barman’s,
Until I had driven him out of the door and his cough
Could be heard to deteriorate under a clock in the landing.
(Och, if he’d known I was Scottish! Then I’d have got it.)’

Elsewhere, Birthmarks’ characters are as diverse as an unhinged neo-Darwinian biologist (‘The Zoologist’s Bath’), an outraged tourist (‘Visiting St Anthony’), an unborn foetus (‘Abortion’), and in the brilliant ‘Lee Ho Fook’s’, the owner of a Chinese restaurant, saved by a builder from a ‘vat of boiling and thunderous tea’. There are also three sets of sequences in the collection which further demonstrate Imlah’s considerable ambition: ‘The Drinking Race’ is by turns a funny and grave look at alcohol, ‘Mountains’ adopts peaks from Snowdonia to the Himalayas as springboards to various existential musings, and ‘from The Counties of England’ takes brief, often droll snapshots of everywhere from Rutland’s ‘Uppingham streets / And the alleys of Oakham’ to the imagined ‘battle of Berkshire’, depicted in much the same manner as the Anglicised Biblical scenes in the paintings of Stanley Spencer. In ‘Oxfordshire’, the entirely believable but likely invented project of ‘Oxford Rebuilt’ (a supposed plan drawn up in 1943 to restore Oxford after forecasted German bombings – ‘Nuffield to Churchill: We’ve got the phoenix, now you deliver the ashes…’) also demonstrates one of Imlah’s recurring tendencies: simultaneously delighting and deceiving the reader, thus revealing the world – as good poetry should – to be the questionable, random and uncertain place it is.

Following a twenty year hiatus, Imlah’s second collection, The Lost Leader, appeared in 2008. Winner of the Forward Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), it is one of the most wide-reaching, surprising and varied volumes of poetry to have been published in years: taking Scottish history from ‘the year dot’ to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot as its starting point, it makes for an almost overwhelming, thoroughly incorporative tour de force. In part a response to Edwin Muir’s assertion that ‘no poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs and the legends’, the collection features a Scottish cast ranging from William Wallace to Fergus of Galloway, Sir Walter Scott to the title poem’s ‘lost leader’, Bonnie Prince Charlie; revivifying Scotland’s history and folklore in often wildly imaginative ways. What makes The Lost Leader such a brilliant book, however, is that while Scotland may be Imlah’s stock material, the true subject matters of the poems reach much further. ‘Domestic’ discusses the traits and general character of the Scottish terrier, for instance, but does so to explore such ‘sagacity, nerve, and the wherewithal / to make the most of little’ more generally, while the fantastical ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ has a train by that name telling another, ‘Joan of ‘Arc’, ‘if they [the passengers] had to wander back in time, / […] what would smack them in the general face’ would be ‘a great big smell – / […] composed of gunpowder, incense as well, / […] you know the stuff / I mean, Joan; the “English” word was ‘faith’’; something which both binds and collides Scottish, English and European histories.

If the first half of The Lost Leader is both a riposte to Muir and an assertion of Imlah’s Scottish heritage (in half-mocking response to the late Angus Calder’s statement that ‘few people thought Mick Imlah […] was a ‘Scottish poet’’), then the second half is perhaps most memorable given its gentler, more sincere and sometimes sombre tone, as well as its more directly personal subject matter. This includes a thoughtful and moving elegy for Stephen Boyd, a perfectly-pitched love poem (‘Maren’), and an affecting piece addressed to the poet’s young daughter (‘Iona’). While heartfelt, however, these personal poems can still be oddly and gravely humorous, as in ‘Past Caring’, where the narrator emptying the flat of an alcoholic female friend states: ‘The gin! / No wonder you’re thin; / Hundreds of bottles of gin; / And feeding them singly into the ring / My arm grows weary from shifting the bottles of gin; / A numbing collection of lots of exactly the same thing.’ As evident in ‘Gordon Brown’ (where the poet recalls meeting not Britain’s ‘lost leader’ but the rugby player, nicknamed ‘The Ayrshire Bull’), there are also repeat references to sports and games throughout Imlah’s work, a much underused subject and device in contemporary poetry as illustrated by the clever vignette ‘London Scottish’, remembering the rugby teams sent to fight in 1914.

On the strength of only two collections, then, Imlah’s highly inventive, quick-witted and often surprisingly executed poems have made his one of the most significant voices in contemporary British poetry: the many approving and admiring appraisals of his work – from poets and critics as different as Andrew Motion, Frieda Hughes, Bernard O’Donoghue, Mark Ford and Stephen Knight – testament to his ample talents and evidently wide appeal. As Douglas Dunn has noted, ‘Imlah’s accomplishments [are often] characteristic of contemporary poetry at its best’, and as longstanding Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a position he held from 1992-2008, it is hard to imagine a contemporary poet more suited to the role.

Imlah’s death in early 2009 – a year after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease – robbed the poetry world of one of its most incisive, original, and talented practitioners.


Ben Wilkinson, 2009
Originally written for the Contemporary Writers site, © British Council

Mick Imlah: The Lost Leader

His first collection of poems in twenty years (since the acclaimed Birthmarks in 1988), and Mick Imlah's new Faber volume, The Lost Leader, is sure to be one of the most significant poetry books published this year. In this weekend's Guardian, Peter McDonald reviews it.

The Culture Show: Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader

Last night's Culture Show on BBC2 featured an interesting - and quite lengthy - discussion of Mick Imlah's excellent second collection, The Lost Leader, including commentaries on, and readings of, the poems by Andrew Motion, James Fenton, and Mark Ford. It's well worth checking out and features a reading of 'London Scottish', a brilliant poem about the rugby teams sent to fight in 1914.

The full programme itself is here, and the feature starts at around 17 and half mins in. There's also readings of two poems from the collection on the Culture Show blog.

Mick Imlah

Talented poet, journalist and TLS Poetry Editor Mick Imlah has died, aged 52, of motor neurone disease. I never had the privilege of meeting Mick, though I will always be grateful for his publishing a handful of my poems, and later, reviews, the first at a time when I had no real biog note to speak of or much of a publication record. His encouragement helped immeasurably, and I am sure that many, many other poets have received similar help and encouragement from Mick along the way, during his 17 years at the TLS - Carrie Etter and David Wheatley two such writers.

This is a huge loss for the world of poetry, as indeed for the world of journalism and literary criticism. It seems odd that, only last week, I completed a critical perspective of his poetry for the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, and had been in touch over a review I recently finished for the TLS. The perspective of his work has now been duly edited and will appear along with his forthcoming profile on the site - one of many appraisals of his work and life which I expect to appear over the coming months.

"Out in the bush is silence now: Savannah seas have islands now"

Jane Holland has an interesting short post on rhyme on her blog at the moment, and it got me thinking about rhyme being this really transformative element in a poem, something, as she puts it, 'which launches the poem off into space', and, when used to its fullest potential, can make a poem truly moving, provocative and memorable. And it also made me think about Mick Imlah's work, something I'm writing a piece on currently, and how for all of the wit, ingenuity and syntactical invention in his narrative poems and dramatic monologues, for all of the impressive scope and surprising shifts in the ambitious pieces in his new collection, the poem of his that always astounds me is the first one in his first book: 'Tusking' from Birthmarks.

It's a really incredible poem (a meditation on colonialism via an imagined elephant hunt) with so many layers to it and a beautifully executed rhyme scheme, the sort that you feel really lives up to the whole 'best words in the best order' idea, without a single one wasted. And I'm clearly not alone in my thoughts of this poem being great, as I read something by Bernard O'Donoghue a while back describing the poem as one which should be in the running for the best poem of the past twenty five years. If you haven't read it, it's worth picking up a second-hand copy of Birthmarks for it alone. To give you a taste, here's a couple of stanzas:

'But if, one night
As you stroll the verandah
Observing with wonder
The place of the white
Stars in the universe,
Brilliant, and clear,
Sipping your whisky
And pissed with fear

You happen to hear
Over the tinkle of Schubert
A sawing - a drilling -
The bellow and trump
Of a vast pain -
Pity the hulks!
Play it again!'

Oh, and after two blog posts in a row on Imlah, I'll be sure to post about something different next time, promise...