Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

When Mick Imlah died at the beginning of this year, he was mourned as one of the outstanding British poets of his time. He published only two collections, the dazzling and aptly individual Birthmarks in 1988, and The Lost Leader in 2008: the twenty-year gap between the two books, though tantalising in the extreme for his admirers, was a period of continuous exploration and change. For at least ten years before its publication the second book was expected, its name was chosen, it was about to be sent to a publisher—on occasion was sent, and then retracted. A few new poems appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 3 (1995), but it was the small private-press publication Diehard in 2006 that gave a first real taste of his new material. The long delay, the result both of Mick’s technical perfectionism and of a steady deepening and focusing of his vision, gave an extraordinary cumulative force to the The Lost Leader, when he finally decided to let it appear. Perhaps his hand was forced by his diagnosis with motor neurone disease in November 2007. His terrible last months were those of his greatest critical acclaim, including the award of the Forward Prize, and shortlisting for the T. S. Eliot Prize—the prize-giving on January 12 was grimly overshadowed by the news that he had died that morning. He was only 52.

It was typical of Mick not to be troubled by the career pressures which naturally affect most young writers. The work itself was the important thing, however long it took. To those who knew him he seemed to move at two different speeds simultaneously. He was entrancingly quick-witted, funny, several moves ahead in exact and ironic understanding of any matter being talked about; but he was equally and happily prone to a dawdling, quizzical slowness. It was much the same in his physical movements. In his Oxford days he was a very fast runner; he always loved sport, cricket and rugby in particular, both of which he played for Magdalen, captaining the First XV in 1978. He played on the wing, where he showed a startling power of acceleration. But off the pitch his preferred pace was a gentle amble. He stayed on a long time in Oxford, teaching, writing poems, working on a never-finished doctoral thesis on King Arthur in Victorian poetry. I can see him very clearly now, leaving Magdalen and sauntering up the High Street, looking about him in his friendly but slightly abstracted fashion. There was always a hint of mystery to him, a sense of speed held in reserve, of subtle and complex thought not lightly given away. He combined the instincts of the team player with those of the poetic solitary, whose life was being led, richly but unguessably, in his imagination.

Mick was born on September 26, 1956, and grew up in Milngavie, not far from Glasgow. His father’s promotion brought the family south in 1966, to West Wickham in Kent, and Mick subsequently won a scholarship to Dulwich College; the early evidence of his sardonic and particular creative mind is described in this issue by his former English master there, Jan Piggott. From Dulwich he won a Demyship at Magdalen, going up in 1976.

From the start he was academically brilliant, in his off-beat and laconically concise way, and in the days before creative writing had entered university syllabuses Magdalen provided perhaps the best academic environment for a young poet. He had John Fuller as a tutor and encourager; and Magdalen’s John Florio Society, at which poems are read and criticised with at least a pretence of ignorance of their authorship, was a useful forum for Mick’s early work. For many years Mick was secretary of the Society, his minutes of the previous meeting becoming ever more extended and involved fantasias on the relatively ordinary things that had actually been said and done. They showed a talent for a baroque and slightly menacing transformation of reality that was also seen in many of his poems. Throughout his life, Mick’s strong feelings of loyalty to groups, teams and institutions that nurtured him, co-existed with a tendency to satirical mischief and play.

In 1982 John Fuller’s Sycamore Press published Mick’s first pamphlet The Zoologist’s Bath and other adventures. It was highly original, its easy acquaintance with his favourite Victorians combined with a decidedly uneasy sense of the contemporary. The presence of Browning was evident in the blank-verse dramatic monologues, the comic-horror title-poem in particular being spoken by a ripely eccentric Victorian evolutionist; though that poem also has a short opening section spoken by the imaginary scientist’s sister, which is the first appearance of a looser anapaestic metre which was to become a long-term favourite of Mick’s. The other poems used stanzaic forms, in the airless torment of ‘Jealousy’ the rhyme-words being stiflingly repeated. His work was literary in the most vital sense, relishing formal control and syntactical play, and rich in allusions to a hinterland of histories, real and imaginary. It wasn’t simply narrative, it spoke with casual confidence of a world made of stories. He could deconstruct, condense or hallucinate a story, or merely touch on it with cool obliquity, but the narrative impulse and interest were central to his poetry from the start. He never wrote a merely descriptive poem, and even the mysterious lyric poems in Birthmarks involve cryptic glimpses of stories; while the little 6-line verses on ‘The Counties of England’ (a project undertaken in league with John Fuller) visit playfully surreal visions on their helpless subjects. It was only at the end of his life that he wrote poems undisguisedly about those he loved, his partner and his children. The occasion for a poem was always some intense ironic perception about life.

Birthmarks dealt in part, as Mick explained, with ‘those things—class, family, congenital strengths and weaknesses, prejudices, addictions, tattoos, that people are stuck with, whether they like it or not’. This, he said, had emerged as his subject, and it was something he was stuck with himself. One notes that the list comprises the congenital and the acquired, and that the weaknesses outnumber the strengths, while class and family have at least an ambivalent status. As he says in the poem ‘Birthmark’, ‘It’s as bad to fall astray / As to start from the wrong place’. There the bilberry-coloured stain ‘stamped / From ear to livid ear’ is self-induced, the result of incessant drinking; that it is called a birthmark suggests that it is none the less inescapable. The bizarre conceit, by which each broken vein is the lost leg of a millipede, making a symbolic self-sacrifice for the drinking poet, is treated with the unforgettable logic of a sinister dream. But if various waking nightmares—failure, sexual betrayal, the drinker’s oblivion—stalk the pages of Birthmarks, the book itself gives no sense of entrapment, is indeed exhilaratingly inventive. On the page as on the field Mick was a ‘Classic sure-foot’, as he calls the mountain goat that none the less falls to its death. The darkly witty placing and facing of horrors, the presaging and then the monitoring of disaster, were always to be his forte.

Five years earlier, in 1983, Mick had been one of the founding editors (with Nicholas Jenkins, Peter McDonald and Elise Paschen) of the revived Oxford Poetry, and in the same year had taken over from Andrew Motion the editorship of Poetry Review, which he shared at first with Tracey Warr. Teaching in Oxford as a Junior Lecturer at Magdalen till 1988, Mick was therefore working simultaneously at both ends of what was seen as a dominant Oxford-London poetry axis. This dominance was of course robustly challenged by the burgeoning of regional publishers through the 1970s, some, such as Bloodaxe in Newcastle and Carcanet in Manchester, very big players indeed; but it fed persistent resentments. When in 1994 the ‘New Generation’ promotion of twenty young poets was launched to match Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, Poetry Review ran a special number with an editorial by Mick’s successor Peter Forbes which singled out Mick as ‘the only “traditional” poet on the list’, and denigrated him as ‘a marginal figure who has only produced one book and that six years ago’. Imlah’s work, he said, was marked by ‘clenched formality’ and ‘Oxonian hauteur’, his monologues ‘the essence of dusty Oxonianism’. I only cite such quaint views to illustrate a kind of blind factionalism that had some currency in the poetry scene in which Mick played a significant role as editor as well as practitioner. It goes without saying that many of the fables and instances in Birthmarks—‘Cockney’, ‘Lee Ho Fook’s’, ‘Goldilocks’—were mordantly modern, however virtuosic their rhyming or formal patterning. In Poetry Review Forbes ran ‘Past Caring’, a notably delicate, exact and exploratory poem about alcoholism, of which all he could find to say was that ‘it shows even greater obsession with shape’. (He was right in that: the poem has a remarkable shape, integral to its meaning, and once seen never forgotten.)

Part of the appeal of Birthmarks lay naturally in its being a young man’s book, magnetised by youthful mortifications just as it was energised by a youthful pleasure in pure skill. A certain shyness or embarrassability informed the poems’ story-telling, their quirky mixture of candour and deflection. It seems to me now more clearly than ever a wonderful achievement and also more clearly than ever to bring back a portrait of Mick in his twenties. His early life was, in a happy and ordinary but undeniable way, fairly sheltered, and there was a vein of passivity in his temperament that showed in his dreamy slowness and sometimes uneasy deferral of decisions. He loved the reassuring routines of work, sport, smoking and drinking—the last interfering sometimes with the first. He was dynamically fit, but physically unadventurous, never learning to swim, ride a bicycle or drive a car. He would go to Scotland, or to John Fuller’s cottage in North Wales with other Oxford friends, but for a long time resisted foreign travel. The announcement one year that he really was going to tour the northern French cathedrals was followed in due course by a postcard from Taunton, which was easier to get to, and where he was staying in a pub and watching the cricket (the ‘twin towers’ of Taunton, in his poem ‘Somerset’, are Ian Botham and Viv Richards). It was only when he got a job on Departures, the American Express travel magazine, that the postcards started coming in from Mauritius or the Seychelles instead. All of which is perhaps only to say that inexperience was quite consciously a part of the compound of his early work. ‘Experience’, he suggested in an interview in 1983, ‘can be confining, almost a handicap.’ ‘Brawl in Co. Kerry’ and ‘Visiting St Anthony’ were what he called ‘imaginary travel poems’: ‘Not travelling has its own glamour…It’s the places I haven’t been that are interesting to me.’ In his second year at Oxford he was recycling his school essays with impressive results, and he got a very good First without bothering to read very much; as a young man he had a clever person’s laziness and justifiable confidence in his own powers.

To anyone who had only read The Lost Leader such a portrait would barely be recognisable. It is a book that crackles with learning, and gives, overall, extraordinary evidence of accumulated knowledge and deeply meditated experience. It is rich in epigraphs, sometimes several to a poem, welcoming and defending, whilst opening up further perspectives of irony and allusion; they would make an interesting study in themselves. The sense of an inescapable history that is a keynote of Birthmarks here permeates much of the book to savage or tragic or absurd effect. Mick clearly had a sense of the collection as a whole from early on, but a lot had to happen before it reached a shape, mass and pitch he was satisfied with. An element of mystery lies in the gestation of the book and survives in the dark assemblage of the finished thing. In 1994 he wrote of this work in progress, ‘If Birthmarks says, we can only be what we are, this says, we can fail to be even that’. Five years later, he explained that many of the poems in it would ‘investigate, some in personal but more of them in historical contexts, the separation of the individual from what he ought to belong to, whether by his own fault, by the dereliction of elders or superiors or God, or by the misdirection of false “prophets”: there are Scottish and Hebrew motifs, and clutches of poems set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’ The title-poem was then seen as being a longer ‘sequence’ that would connect ‘a personal and contemporary disillusion’ with ‘the experience of the Highland Scots deserted by Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden. Cheated of love (in its social sense), the sequence strives to compensate with hatred: the climax is the poem “Two Minutes’ Silence”, the length of time the narrator must hold his tongue while hypocritical respects are paid to the Great One in a football stadium.’ Over the following years the poem was slowly refined and redefined into the luminous masterpiece that it now is. (The planned section ‘Two Minutes’ Silence’, dropped from the book, is printed for the first time in this issue.)

‘There are Scottish…motifs…’ The slowness of the book’s gestation was due in part to Mick’s own ramifying exploration of a subject which surprisingly he had barely touched on before. In Birthmarks only one parenthetical aside ‘(Och, if he’d known I was Scottish! Then I’d have got it)’ alluded at all to his nationality. (This was in the poem ‘Goldilocks’, an encounter between an anglicised young Scottish academic and his pitiful and stinking alter ego, the ‘migrant Clydesider’ who steals his bed.) In one of the epigraphs to the poem ‘Namely’, his bristlingly humorous disquisition on his own unusual surname, Mick quotes Angus Calder, in Scotland on Sunday: ‘Few people thought Mick Imlah, who teaches at Oxford, was a “Scottish poet”’. As he admitted more plainly in his moving elegy for his friend Stephen Boyd, ‘years of a Southern education…/ Had trimmed my Scottishness to a tartan phrase / Brought out on match days and Remembrance Days’. His Scottish accent, rarely heard even by close friends, was something he said he kept up his sleeve, ‘like a dirk for tight corners’. But his new collection was to be steeped in Scotland, in Scottish history and landscape, literature and legend. A series of dated episodes, and dated lives, from ‘Muck’ (merely ‘AD’), and ‘Michael Scot’ (1175-1232), through to ‘Electric Blanket’ (1966) and ‘Stephen Boyd’ (1957-99), shapes the book, his personal narrative seeming to emerge in the last phase from this long and fractured Scottish history. Some of the causes of this large change of emphasis are discussed in this issue by James Campbell. They are inextricably both personal and professional, one of them clearly being the editing, with Robert Crawford, of the massive and vigorous New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000), with its abundance of poems in Gaelic (faced by distinguished English translations).

The richly elaborated literariness of The Lost Leader is as vital as its Scottishness, and as revealing of Mick’s own development. After Birthmarks had come out in 1988, there was a sense that he could do pretty well anything; but for the following four years he wrote no poems at all. In fact, these were also the years that he was working as Poetry Editor at Chatto and Windus, a job into which he had again followed Andrew Motion. It was work in a way continuous with that at Poetry Review, and another phase in his benign but clear-eyed career as an enabler of poetry, carried on to the end through his thirteen years as Poetry Editor at the TLS. He had started reviewing for the TLS in the early 1980s, and as time went on his wide and curious and patient reading seemed to become a more and more integral part of his personality, as it did of his work. The unwieldy kit bags from which he was to become almost inseparable contained alongside various kinds of sports gear the ever heavier mass of books that he wanted to keep within reach. Quick and sharp from the beginning, he developed into a wonderful critic, quietly brilliant, wise and humane. He had always loved Tennyson more, he said, ‘than most people seem to’, and he made a selection of his work for Faber’s Poet-to-Poet series (typically long-delayed, it appeared in 2004); he wrote intimately of Tennyson’s reticence, his problems in revealing his deepest experience to the public, when that experience was ‘unsocial, painful, and shaming to a degree’. ‘The “coming woe” is always large on Tennyson’s horizon…and his poems had to put on forms or metaphors which would allow him to say his “woe” without dishonour.’ And he celebrated Tennyson’s technical genius, his ‘refined instinct for the weights and measures of words and lines (a faculty in which the general reader has since lost interest)’. It was such an instinct in Mick himself that made him not only so natural a verse technician but so discriminating an editor.

Much of his best critical writing, in review essays in the TLS, was on lesser writers than Tennyson, some of them almost forgotten, such as Robert Bridges or Laurence Binyon, some well-known but less regarded, like John Buchan: subjects that brought out his canny wit as well as a kind of fraternal tenderness, and showed his complete indifference to fashion. His critical pieces deserve to be collected, for their own merits, and also as adjuncts to his growth as a poet. Sometimes his reading bore very direct fruit, as in the case of Tom Leonard’s Places of the Mind (1993), his biography of the alcoholic Scottish poet James Thomson, ‘B. V.’, who became the subject of the second of Mick’s ‘Afterlives of the Poets’ (following the tour-de-force of that on Tennyson himself, produced for his centenary in 1992). In the enchanting Theocritan invitation extended to Thomson, his friend J. W. Barrs proposes that

                 if your pledge of abstinence holds good,
The Fates may yet extend their benisons 
                 And Thomson’s star be twinned with Tennyson’s
A hundred years from now.

Mick placed these twinned sequences at the close of The Lost Leader, as a teasingly ambivalent coda, noting that a constant theme of Thomson’s serious verse was ‘the impossibility of an afterlife’.

The book’s ‘last poems’, though, are the beautiful ones about his partner Maren and their daughter Iona. It was always Mick’s belief that poems, ‘should somehow (whatever else they do) entertain or stimulate a reader, rather than exalting the writer’. His fine judgment on this matter persists in these unprecedentedly personal pieces, the tone, as he rightly thought, ‘not mawkish… or maudlin’. It was an inexorable aspect of his illness that he lost the ability to write or speak; the mystery of his thoughts became permanent. But he approached death with courage and humour for which the best words are to us mere awe-struck epithets—staggering, breath-taking. He held his nerve to the end. As he wrote to his elder daughter:

Succession is easy: first it was them,
then me for a bit; and now it’s you.