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‘I don’t like sending things out for public display with holes and patches’, Mick Imlah confessed in an interview with Nick Jenkins in the autumn 1983 issue of Oxford Poetry; ‘So I revise, much too much’. Only the year before, John Fuller had published The Zoologist’s Bath as a Sycamore Press pamphlet; the process of setting its thirteen pages of text for the press’s primitive treadle machine was, Fuller has recalled, much complicated by Mick’s ‘ingrained perfectionism’: ‘as the weeks (the months) went by with revision after revision, I could see the rewriting never ending at all, as every aside was followed up, every rift laden.’ Most poets will leap at the chance of getting their work into print, but Mick abided throughout his writing career to Wallace Stevens’s stern dictum that publishing a book of poetry is a ‘damned serious business’. In both 2001 and 2005 he seemed on the point of allowing The Lost Leader to enter the public domain, where it had been long awaited, only to change his mind at the last moment.

I was hardly surprised, then, as one of his literary executors, to find Mick’s papers and computer files contained much fascinating draft material relating to poems he did choose to publish, and a substantial number of unpublished poems and fragments.

As far as his poetry goes, the Imlah archive can be divided into three categories: uncollected, unpublished, and unfinished. The uncollected category is the smallest, consisting of ‘Doing It’, which first appeared in the same issue of Oxford Poetry as the interview with Nick Jenkins, and a number of counties in ‘The Counties of England’ series on which he collaborated with John Fuller, and which came out in the June 1986 issue of Poetry Review (edited by Mick), under the rather unconvincing pseudonym of John Bull. Mick chose to include eight of his contributions to the series in Birthmarks; here are a few that didn’t make the cut:

Middlesex
Something too small has tried to creep into the party.
It is covered in smog and carries the Evening Standard—
Everyone giggles. Up goes a rustic bouncer.
Then out of its pocket the midget uncrumples a postcard
Insisting, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I am a county’;
Nobody talks to the thing, and it leaves at the end.

Nottinghamshire
The home of lace, where public servants act
As though their heads were made of the same stuff;
Where else would they hold up the London train
For fifteen minutes, just to look for a trinket
One old lady might have left on it:
‘A black plastic cup for poaching eggs’?

Westmorland
Fragments of weather-war. A frost in May
Searing the damson blossom. Hay uncut,
The know-all cocking looks at Morecambe Bay
Where indigo clouds trundle from beaten Ireland.
Late August: oats which swam in the June wind
Laid in bleak patches, mottled, grey-green, drowned.

Wiltshire
Sitting astride a Chieftain’s gun-barrel today
I imagine a plain near Avebury, and a soldier
Repeatedly raped by a circle of virgins disguised
As old rocks. Colleagues are working on similar scenes
To be set in a Chippenham shop selling woollens and tartan,
At Marlborough School, and in sundry Victorian houses in Swindon.

Incidentally, the other pseudonym he used while editor of Poetry Review was Ralph Crozier, under which moniker he published an early version of ‘Hall of Fame’ in the issue of January 1984, one devoted to the subject of drinking.

Among the computer files Alan Hollinghurst, my co-executor, and I received from Mick’s partner, Maren Meinhardt, was one enticingly entitled ‘Unpublished Poems’. We took this to mean these were poems Mick considered complete (taking into account the usual caveats, more extreme in his case than that of most, about poems never being finished, merely abandoned); and indeed a number of them featured in provisional contents lists of either Birthmarks or The Lost Leader. There were nine poems in this file: ‘Assumption’, ‘Hugo Williams’, ‘Doing It’, ‘Solomon’, ‘Skopelos’ [titled in other versions ‘Greek Tragedy’], ‘Author, Author’, ‘Eleven’, ‘Two Minutes’ Silence’, and ‘Prison’. Three of these poems, ‘Doing It’, ‘Prison’, and ‘Solomon’, were first drafted in the early 80s, while two, ‘Eleven’ and ‘Two Minutes’ Silence’, were conceived as sections to be added to ‘The Lost Leader’ to make it into a sequence in which, as he put it in a 1999 application for a Writers’ Award, he planned to connect

a contemporary and personal 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.

‘Hugo Williams’ is a witty tribute to the poet Hugo Williams, and ‘Author, Author’ is about the writer Andrea Ashworth, with whom Mick was involved for a time in the mid-90s. ‘Skopelos’ is a dramatic monologue spoken by a holidaymaker on a Greek island who allows a homeless cat into his apartment, where she promptly gives birth to kittens.

By far the most ambitious of these poems is ‘Solomon’. The final version that Mick intended for a while to include in The Lost Leader is 101 lines long, but there are longhand and typescript versions that run to over seven pages and almost 300 lines. ‘Solomon’ is written in sonorous blank verse of the sort used in ‘Quasimodo Says Goodnight’ and ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ that verges on a pastiche of a Browning or Tennyson poem, and yet communicates an unnervingly modern sense of ennui or obsession, of unease or derangement. Unlike the hapless Quasimodo or the misguided Zoologist, Solomon has no one and nothing to fear but himself. The early versions come with an epigraph from the children’s magazine Look and Learn:

Which character from history would you most like to interview, and why? (In 15 words or fewer)
—A Competition in Look and Learn

King Solomon. Because he knew the women of the earth.
—Losing entry

At the poem’s opening an unnamed I, in the early version, records listening to Solomon speak on the grandest of themes, ‘Of meteors, plagues and burning scimitars, / Of armies numberless as the ants on Earth’, until he interrupts the King by asking ‘abruptly about women’:

                                       At which
He lay his head despondently aside
Like a man after a heavy meal alone
And sighed, for an energy that wouldn’t come…

The poem’s theme, in other words, is the despair that attends limitless sexual conquests, though in the case of Solomon no real conquest is involved, for the women are brought to him by his minions and he merely has to decide the most aesthetically pleasing order in which to sleep with them. ‘I rarely asked a name’, he confides (I’m quoting now from the final version):

                                       A woman’s soul
Appeared to me, and is retrieved by me
In terms of colour. Names have unwieldy,
Shared, defective, ageing histories
Betokening much beyond the split second
A sexed animal needs to express herself.
For instance: when the English come to mind,
I see the blush of little pastels wrapped
Like apples in a basket, and remove
Layers of reserve like linen, to let breathe
Cathedral greens; the brass of trumpets blown
Through blazed cheeks; stipple winking from a pond;
Blood on the dairy floor, and the rum buff
Of broken pots in sheds; the pebbled blue
Of a spring sky; the quick flare of blue
Skimmed by the kingfisher through evenings dim
With dying bonfires…wet dawns, dripping mint,
A freckled spawning, and a sense of moss
On the inside of things, and rust, and gloom.

Such lines typify the imaginative energy, the craft and the care that Mick invested in this poem. Solomon is of course no more to be admired or envied, than, say, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert or the Duke of Ferrara in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. His final emptiness and bitterness are particularly vividly rendered in the earlier versions; ‘his heartlessness’, his interlocutor reports, ‘contended with his fears / And lost’, and he sees his future shrink to a ‘sour / Dropsical extinction, like a row of noughts’. The final version, on the other hand, concludes with the poor Queen of Sheba, decisively rejected after a ‘tenacious month’ with Solomon, weaving away in a seaside town,

An umpteenth set of hangings for my bed —
Which will be beautiful, like her, but show
No clear improvement on the ones before.

And so to the ‘unfinished’ poems; in this category I include poems that look finished, but for whatever reason were not deemed worthy by Mick of inclusion in his ‘Unpublished Poems’ file, as well as a quantity of drafts and fragments in various states of completion. Mick, I should say now, was a keeper, rather than a thrower-away; in his flat in Ledbury Road he stored notebooks dating back to his school days, in which he wrote out both poems and cricket scores, copies of most of the issues of papers and magazines in which his poems or reviews appeared, not to mention gas bills, telephone bills, and credit card bills stretching back over decades.

There are many striking pieces in this section of the archive. Consider, for example, this six-line poem written, I’d say, in the 80s (Mick didn’t, alas, date things) probably intended for ‘The Drinking Race’;

            Semi-Final

At dawn, it had been kisses and champagne
And dreams of rolling home the champion ...

I was still in the same battle a lifetime later
With the same foe, when he uncorked a litre

Of German blood. I went back to red wine
And lost the race; Heaven help who won.

A draft of one called ‘Cheers’ in which an IRA terrorist excuses himself for his terrible crime by explaining he was ‘dronk at the time’ was probably conceived for this sequence too; some lines from it were later incorporated into the 31/2 page draft of a poem entitled ‘Provisional’, whose final passage in turn furnished the ending of The Lost Leader’s ‘Dads Army’:

‘I wouldn’t rush up just yet, it’s just

that while you were off on your wargames—’
adventurizing, and for all that
none of us are any the way wiser
(in behind her, a mutter, he ought

 to guard his own,—the old fool) 
                             a German has stolen
Under your lintel, and knocked you up
some eggs and a pair of flachsenkinder.’

The two most obvious candidates for inclusion in a future Collected Poems from this ‘unfinished’ category of the Imlah archive are ‘Hero and Leander’, published for the first time in this issue, and the sections two, three, and four of the sequence with which Mick hoped to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ in 2001. He was working on this poem at the time he put in his application for a Writers’ Award, and in his accompanying statement he explains the poem’s origins:

Appended to the sequence ‘Afterlives of the Poets’, it remarks how the ‘Elegy’ seems profoundly anonymous, composed as it is of borrowed phrases and anticipations of other writers’ titles; then it brings the super-fastidious Gray, man of marmalades and nightcap, fleetingly to the window, and celebrates the English reserve and fustiness of which he is the patron saint.

The first section, in which Mick recalls an English lesson from his schooldays at Dulwich, was included in The Lost Leader, and is one of my favourite poems in the book. In the second section we flash forward a quarter of a century to him sifting through books in his office at the TLS and finding a slew of real and apocryphal titles derived from Gray’s poem: Simple Annals, At the Gates of Mercy, Cool Sequestered Vale, The Paths of Glory, Some Village-Hampden, (‘a history / Of the Junior Lanarkshire Leagues’) The Noiseless Tenor (‘A Covent Garden Murder Mystery’), and so on. In section 3 Gray is brought literally to the window of his rooms in Peterhouse, Cambridge:

                                       The cause:
He had a dread of fire and—since his rooms
At Peterhouse were on the second floor—
Grew fraught above the nightly drunkenness
Of two who shared his staircase, commoners,
Who might in their befuddlement upset
A lamp or candle. After the right research
He ordered, from a firm at Wapping Pier,
A rope ladder, meaning, he told a friend,
To have a bar fixed ‘withinside’ his window
From which this could be hung. Instead the bar
Was fixed—‘I know not why’—on the outer wall,
And so displayed his fears to the whole college.
One dawn, a group of bloods, going out with the Bicester,
Marking this horizontal, thought it sport
To call out ‘Fire!’ A white night-cap is said
To have shown briefly; a hand on the latch: then Gray,
‘Apprised of the trick’, retired again to the couch.

In the poem’s final section the ghost of Gray appears in a Cumbrian wood; The eighteenth-century bard seems to call out to the twenty-first century poet, but, alas, the noise of a waterfall drowns out his words. ‘I thought’, the speaker observes,

              it might have been Attic advice
Or bits of a poem you never got to write.
In your next visit, would you get closer,
Please, and spell out what it was?

The destination of Mick’s archive has not yet been settled. In this brief overview I have only had time to gesture towards some of the highlights. Sifting through drafts of the many projects he dreamed up, which ranged from a long poem on the Pied Piper of Hamelin to a novel about Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s journey in search of the origins of the Nile, chancing across exquisite fragments or utterly distinctive turns of phrase, I have been insistently struck by the originality and sophistication of his sensibility, and by his unerring sense of exactly what he was after in his poetry. It all makes his premature death, and our loss, that much harder to bear.