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Bernard O’Donoghue celebrates the work of Mick Imlah

Mick Imlah
The Lost Leader
Faber and Faber £9.99

Mick Imlah’s previous full collection was Birthmarks in 1988, though his poems have appeared regularly in various compilations and magazines since then, most notably in the beautiful Clutag Press pamphlet Diehard in 2006. Birthmarks was notable for containing a few of the best poems of the current era in English; one of those poems, ‘Tusking’, should be in the running for best single poem of the past quarter-century. ‘Tusking’ is a profound meditation on colonialism and wider issues of justice and fear driven by suspicion. Other poems in that book – ‘Goldilocks’ and ‘Visiting St Anthony’ for instance – were the work of a writer with gifts of wit, formal accomplishment and veiled seriousness which surpassed any of his contemporaries.

So for once it is not an exaggeration to say that this new book has been awaited with eager impatience. And The Lost Leader makes the twenty-year wait worthwhile. ‘Goldilocks’ was the narrative of a self-satisfied young man returning for the night to an Oxford college guest-room, feeling happy with the ‘pleasing (if not unexpected) success’ of the lecture he has just given, and correspondingly discomfited to find a noisome Scottish tramp in his bed. The ‘migrant Clydesider’ makes a wheedling appeal and apology in a wonderfully inventive argot (‘Ah’m off tae ma dandy! Ah’ve done a wee josie – aye wheesh!’) before being violently dismissed ‘with a shout and the push of the boot’ by the unsympathetic narrator who reflects ‘Och, if he’d known I was Scottish! Then I’d have got it’.

   In The Lost Leader, there is no such suppression; the Scottishness is up-front. The title’s reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie is reinforced by an epigraph from the Orcadian Edwin Muir: ‘… no poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs, and the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie. He has no choice but to be at once more individual and less local’. Imlah sets out ambitiously to redress this limitation, stung (or mock stung) by Angus Calder’s observation, prefaced to the poem ‘Namely’ here: ‘Few people thought Mick Imlah, who teaches at Oxford, was a “Scottish poet”’. This is not done in any tunnel-visioned way; the range of Scottishness is wide – temporally, culturally and geographically, extending from the medieval monasticism of Columcille to the rugby player Gordon Brown, ‘The Ayrshire Bull’ who died young in 2001.

   And yet, just as the Browning monologue was the prevailing form rather than the inspiration for the extended narratives of Birthmarks, Scotland is more the material of the poems in The Lost Leader than their subject. Imlah’s technique is stunning; his poetic language is lucid, brilliant and witty. Yet the poems which stay in the mind after repeated readings here are a series of profound but unlaboured personal tributes, especially ‘Maren’ (a love poem which must go straight into any anthology), and ‘Iona’, addressed to the poet’s small daughter. Elsewhere the tributes are as much to suffering as anything else, notably in ‘Past Caring’ to a female relative or close friend who stashed away drink for emergency. Of all the poems here that nobody else could have written – or would have had the courage to write – the most powerful is ‘Stephen Boyd’, in memory of Imlah’s friend and graduate-student colleague who died when he was thirty-eight in 1995. Under the beautiful Scots epigraph from Robert Henryson’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ – ‘And on thai went, talkand of play and sport’ – Imlah recounts the stages of their friendship, punctuated indeed by play and sport, from first meeting as students to their last night drinking together in Crail near St Andrews. Like several of Imlah’s narratives, the poem begins with a dream, but a dream – like one of Henryson’s – that seems more real than might seem possible for transcribed reality:

I can’t drive, and I dreamt that I was driving
Unstoppably through a succession of red lights…

(A less tone-perfect writer would have put the predictable ‘but’ rather than ‘and’ in that first line.) The crash that follows ‘must elsewhere have killed somebody’, but not here; it is Stephen Boyd who steps out of this crash, a relief because the narrator knows him ‘to be dead already’. This extraordinary undermining variation on the device of consolation establishes a disturbing tone which is the poem’s power, as it moves from discussions of rugby (‘David Sole’s grand slam in 1990’) to Monteverdi, Giotto and ‘The first disciple, Andrew of Galilee’ (patron of Scotland). After Boyd’s death, Imlah would still like to know, not his experience of the afterlife, but his ‘standpoint on the new Cronin, Scott Murray’.

   The profundity of these elegies and reminiscences lies precisely in their ‘refusal to mourn’. They are all the more regretful for that. But it also makes them typical of Imlah’s stance, his employment of a vernacular and register that, for all its vividness and ease, can effortlessly embrace matter of the greatest human moment. Reading an Imlah poem (‘Stephen Boyd’ is a classic example) is like taking part in a friendly, easy conversation and suddenly registering the profundity of something that has just been artlessly thrown out. True to its Henryson epigraph, the poem breaks off to reflect on itself:

This is a long poem for a friendship based
On little more than aping Bill McLaren,
And spelling out again that sport matters
Because it doesn’t matter...

Well, yes! How often have we sports-enthusiasts, rather shamefacedly, found ourselves saying that without feeling justified by it. Yet here is a poetic elegy that shows it be true. And of course this is not a point about sport; it is a matter of style and language. Imlah can move smoothly from the highest style and subject-matter to the everyday things that obsess us and trouble us. You are tempted to quote grandly in assent Coleridge’s tribute to Lamb, that to him ‘no sound is dissonant which tells of life’.

   So, although these great personal poems are the book’s culmination, it would not be in the spirit of Imlah’s unique morality to end with them. A concluding section pulls back to another of the fantastic sequences like those in Birthmarks, ‘Afterlives of the Poets’. There are two of these: first Tennyson (Imlah’s foremost poetic enthusiasm), described in a typical Imlah-fictional trip to Aldworth, the poet’s house in Sussex. This is intertwined with a notice in the Times in 1948 when a later Lord Tennyson indignantly declares that a disturber of the peace in Piccadilly Circus, who gave his lordship’s name to the police, was not him nor known to him. The ghost encountered in Aldworth tells the narrator

‘The trick of the afterlife is – that what you sign up for, you get,
Which as in the case of Tithonus, we have leisure enough to regret.’

The second poetic afterlife is that of the classic Scottish poète maudit James ‘BV’ Thomson, who died after a London life of misery and alcoholic excess at the age of forty-eight in 1882. Thomson was vehemently opposed to the notion of the afterlife in his greatest poem ‘City of Dreadful Night’ In Imlah’s version he is a more literate version of the Clydeside tramp in ‘Goldilocks’.

   This book has as much gravitas as any volume of poetry published in the present generation, lightly as it carries it. Of course it is about Scotland, on the face of it, and all the great Scottish figures and moments are there: Bruce, Wallace, Scott, Burns, Braveheart. But these subjects are only the magician’s tools in Imlah’s hands. And whenever the topic or the writing threatens to fit too readily or too genially into its groove, the reader is hit with an epigrammatic ferocity from another range.

Love moves the family, but hate
makes the better soldier... (‘Guelf’)

   The Lost Leader ends sounding like Dante rewritten by Clough (Dante comes to mind in this book more often than just in ‘Guelf’):

And fair play to rejects – to busts with broken noses – …
powered with the purpose of having been – being, after all, stars,
whose measure we may not take, nor know the wealth of their rays.

This is the work of a major poet, genially presented as it often is. There are few contemporary poets of whose afterlife we can feel so confident.