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When Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader appeared to universal critical acclaim (and winning the Forward Prize) immediately before his tragically early death at the start of 2009, many admirers wondered at the twenty-year gap since his previous full book Birthmarks in 1988. It was also thought surprising that the emphatically Scottish theme which gave singleness to the new book was not found in Birthmarks whose subject was much harder to generalise about. Many readers, both in 1988 and looking back in 2009, noted the technical parallels to Browning’s dramatic monologues in several of the accomplished masterpieces in the early collection: in ‘Goldilocks’, ‘Visiting St Anthony’, ‘Insomnia’ and ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (all of which came from Imlah’s brilliant and substantial earlier pamphlet from Sycamore Press). The Browning parallel was partly with the use of the slippery narrator in those poems; if anything though, those narrators were less determinate than Browning’s. You knew less where you stood with them.

Where might we place Imlah within the poetry of that era? A few poets contemporary with him or slightly older were sometimes called ‘postmodernist’: Glyn Maxwell or, further back, Paul Muldoon or Medbh McGuckian. Part of the common factor with these writers was precisely that you didn’t know where you stood with them, and how the narrating voice related to the story it told. As soon as such names are mentioned though, it becomes clear that Mick Imlah was different. With him—as I will try to show by looking at two poems here, ‘Tusking’ and ‘Silver’—the elements of the story were always clear and forcefully explicit. The puzzle was how exactly to fit the verbal elements together.

‘Tusking’ was the first poem in Birthmarks. It had aroused considerable interest when it was first published in the TLS not long before. A memorable formula from Beckett’s Watt describes the dilemma well: the poem is full of images ‘of great formal brilliance but indeterminate purport’—‘Harrow elephants’, ‘lithe/ shadows with little/ glinting teeth’; the alliterative compound ‘piano-pleasure’, readily intelligible yet unfamiliar; ‘a massacre song/ with the notes wrong / on Massa’s baby’. What most of the images have in common is a general political reference; but what is distinctive in this writing is that the images do not add up to a political statement or definable position, for all their power:

But if, one night
As you stroll the verandah...
You happen to hear...
A sawing—a drilling –
The bellow and trump
Of a vast pain –
Pity the hulks!
Play it again!

The general context here is unmistakable: the world of imperialism and exploitation and cruelty. We get the references, to Casablanca and to the settings of some works of Conrad: the world of Nostromo, or Almayer’s Folly maybe, rather than Browning. But it is less clear exactly what the poet is saying with them. It is clearer what we are meant to feel than what we are meant to think.

I remember an occasion after a reading by Imlah at the Arvon Foundation in Devon when he was challenged rather bluntly about his politics. He said, lightly but firmly, that he did have quite strong political views, but he wasn’t going to declare them. The same thing, I think, is true of his poems. Many writers of course take exactly this line, keeping their politics out of their poetry: it is a modern critical cliché. But Imlah does it with a difference, and in an altogether more interesting way. What is usually done is to make a simple (and it can seem rather unimaginative) Manichean opposition between politics/ the public world, and something vague and private, called ‘Art’ or some such term. Imlah’s writing achieves its effects in both artistic and political terms by avoiding that opposition. His poems are neither political credos nor declarations of the autonomy of art. The languages of both worlds are mixed together, leaving the reader to assemble a meaning. Consider the line ‘Pity the hulks!’ for example, four lines after ‘the tinkle / of ice and Schubert’.

In seeking a literary context for this kind of writing, one surprising comparison might be made. It often strikes us reading writers of ‘The Movement’—principally Larkin and Amis maybe—that the kind of heartless brutality they often affect is a form of disguised compassion, a refusal to be priggish. It is an irony, often leavened with comedy, adopted out of a fear of sentiment. Zachary Leader’s recent The Movement Reconsidered (OUP, 2009) shows this spirit to be still alive in writers such as Craig Raine, for example. Imlah’s writing though seems to me to take this kind of refusal to preach in a rich and interesting direction, with thought-provoking challenges for the politically minded reader. It is the quality in him that carries over most strikingly into The Lost Leader.

The shorter poem ‘Silver’ clearly works in the same way from its opening lines.

Silver in block and chain
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.     (Birthmarks, 38)

It would clearly be inappropriate to invoke too explicit a post-colonial methodology in addressing this poem; yet it is clear that the same imagery of historical injustice, suffering and exploitation is operating as in ‘Tusking’. The second section of this 19-line poem moves the setting from a slave-ship to the neglect of an old man who dies alone so his discoverers find ‘his last meal full of maggots on the cooker’ as well as—in a touching detail which is typical of the way that Imlah makes sport a crucial factor in the personal life (think of ‘Stephen Boyd’ in The Lost Leader)—

a bowls cup from the Fifties, silvery-brown,
By the tin of Duraglit –
He had been polishing it.

This is a more particular reference than anything in the more major poem ‘Tusking’, but it operates in similar ways. Certainly, there is no fear of sentiment here. It is on the margins of Dickensian mawkishness. But, as with the fragments of political language in ‘Tusking’ or the opening section of ‘Silver’, Imlah feels at liberty to range through all voices and languages. He would perhaps not welcome the invocation of Bakhtinian heteroglossia (Imlah was a brilliant reader and critic, but his preference was for unelaborated clarity of terminology); but that is one way of describing the liberty these poems take to move from one register or voice to another.

This is not political poetry in any agitprop way; Imlah would probably go along with Seamus Heaney’s observation about himself, that his ‘temper is not Brechtian’. So it is remarkable how much political matter is worked into these books. This is poetry written in the spirit of Keats’s famous letter to Reynolds: ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us… Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze us with itself, but with its subject.’ The critical style is grander, but the point is the same. Imlah’s good humour and mannerliness are not directly designing, but leave us with an uneasy sense of the importance of his subject. The subject is present through the language, all the more effectively because the poem’s design on us is so impalpable.