It was predictable that a new collection by Mick Imlah would be excellent and
highly engaging. A long time in appearing – Birthmarks was published twenty
years ago, with Diehard from Clutag Press following in a limited edition in
2006 – The Lost Leader is, at 126 pages, fuller than most new collections.
Readers of Diehard won’t be surprised by this, nor by Imlah’s sustained,
lively and inventive meditations on Scottishness and Scottish history from
the early medieval period to more or less the present day. All the same, it
marks a change of direction in Imlah’s writing that few could have
anticipated. “Muck”, for example, like “The Prophecies” and “I”, is set at
the time of the early Hiberno-Scottish saints. Christian and archaeological
pieties are cleverly avoided in favour of an irreverent and demotic
monologue by an exponent of “wash-tub coracles” from
about the year dot – before
MacBrayne and the broken ice; before
Colum and Camelot, whose annals skate
over our failed attempt on Muck . . .
Weird ripples in chronology here – “MacBrayne”, “the red back half of a toy
tractor” – are perhaps traceable to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, or some
of Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland. Upset time is realized equally in
the secular tone.
Early Scottish history extends opportunities for the exercise of a poetic
imagination. Only seldom have they been taken up. The obstacles are perhaps
technical as much as anything else. It could be worthy of note that the
opening poems in The Lost Leader seem to have resisted Imlah’s skill as a
well-rehearsed master of versification. Not so his sardonic energies:
Is nothing sacred? Not the burial ground
of the ur-kings, the first Scots known by
name?
“. . . And Fergus’s son was Domangart
Macfergus;
and he ‘begat’ Comgall MacDomangart;
who in his turn begat – aheugh! –
MacComgall,
begat Ferchar . . . begat Ainbcellach Mac
cheugh! Mac Ferchar, begat aheugh!
Muiredach
Mac – heigh, ho – Eochaid the Venomous –
and thirty more I could name, but for this
caaatchoo! – down to your own John Smith.
Ahem”.
While it could be a satire on Gaeldom’s penchant for genealogy and the title
“I” indicate number 1, the beginning, it could just as well suggest the
poet’s own predicament. Exotic names of the Dalriadan kings wind down to the
common or garden John Smith (Ahem). A later poem, “Namely”, is more
explicit. One of two epigraphs to the poem (and there are a lot of epigraphs
in The Lost Leader) is from the late Angus Calder: “Few people thought Mick
Imlah, who teaches at Oxford, was a ‘Scottish poet’”. Calder probably shared
the same dilemma – allegedly “wrong” accent, not quite Scots enough,
although he was too intelligent to let it get him down. This also applies to
Imlah. It bothers him, but just enough to make it an opportunity for
triumphantly vigorous wit:
. . . there’s a primary school near Edinburgh
that part of me never left, and [I] cite my
classmate Lorna MacDougall,
who grew up to share the name of the
novelist Ishiguro,
“Ish” to his friends on the circuit, or point
to the passage in Google
which proves IMLACH was what my family
too had originally been,
Gaelic for those of the loch, until with the
Clearance of Jura
the ‘c’ was lured from its croft by the
trawlers of Aberdeen
And struck out o’er the moor, O.
As Imlah works his way through Scottish episodes and characters, it becomes
apparent that his trick, whether instinctive or deliberate, is to approach a
subject from an unexpected angle. “Sweetheart”, for example, partly to do
with John de Baliol, takes the form of an “anachronistic gathering” of men
associated with Balliol College, including Hilaire Belloc, “Both funny
hee-hee, and funny Hilaire-ious!”. Others present were: “the Cardinal
Manning, with Gerard Manley Hopkins; Lords Curzon, Asquith, Ratcliff, Milner
and Grey, with Lady Grey; Messrs Swinburne, Arnold and Gay; the Prime
Minister, the Right Hon Mr Harold Macmillan; and Mr Edward Heath, MP. Mr
Graham Greene sent his regrets”. It is high spirited, but with an ironic
sting in its tail.
“Wallflower” is one of a number of poems which show Imlah at his wittiest and
most rueful. Sir William Wallace is depicted “Not as a freedom fighter,
mind, / But as a fashion victim!”,
with an overskin
Of velvet, parted into four
Like the hockey shirt of the Harlequin:
Azure and sable, gules and or
(A quarter gold, a quarter black,
A quarter red, and a quarter blue),
And each with its buttoned hole in the back
To tug one of his organs through,
The heart, the liver, lungs and spleen:
Those relics to be borne away
To Haddington, and Aberdeen,
To Galloway and Stornoway . . .
(I ought to add, that in a sling
Bearing a bent spike for a bonnet,
He twirled his head, like a precious thing
With the price still on it).
If, as verse, Imlah’s writing has panache, as poetry it frequently has power
to provoke or move. “Braveheart” tells of the adventure-cum-pilgrimage
undertaken by Sir James Douglas and his retinue that was intended to deliver
the heart of King Robert I to Jerusalem. Instead, they fell foul of an
engagement with a Moorish army in Andalusia, and the Bruce’s heart was lost.
Written in twelve-line verse paragraphs in couplets, the poem impresses with
some nifty rhymes (“leopard, he / jeopardy”), and a narrative skill in verse
worthy of Scott and Byron. The title poem takes the form of a lyrical
address to the Young Pretender by one of his officers in 1746 in the
aftermath of Culloden. It’s to be doubted if “The Lost Leader” can be called
a “Jacobite poem”, or its author a Jacobite; instead, it’s a poem spoken by
a Jacobite asserting a strength of loyalty superior to that of Charles
Edward.
The cause was light,
A flower worn in the heart,
The secret white of the rose:
And all we did was sweetened by it.
Inevitably, there’s a poem that alludes to Robert Burns. “The Ayrshire
Orpheus” is written in Poulter’s Measure and also exhibits Imlah’s narrative
deftness. While the story-telling mode feels a bit old-fashioned, its
vernacular tone is simultaneously entertaining and disconcerting, permitting
it to include the present day:
Poor Orpheus! He felt like some old town
Of Carrick in decline: Maybole, or Girvan,
The pubs shut down, the kids, taunting
“the clown
Who couldna face the front”, on drugs
from Irvine;
While dismal in the twilight of surviving
Alone with his shopping, sore to be rid
of her,
He walks the roads of home a widower.
“Diehard” is less inevitable, being about Sir Walter (“father-figure”) Scott
and the painter Sir David Wilkie. Scott’s and Wilkie’s careers and
personalities are evoked nimbly, but the ostensibly Scottish occasion is to
create a poem from which more universal concerns are allowed to leak, these
being changes in fortune, upheavals in taste and fashion, the vulnerability
of reputation, so that Scott’s posterity in the popular mind comes to be two
kinds of terrier, one known in the Borders as Diehard, “for their tenacity
in the field”: “That way, like Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering / You come to
lend your name to a whole breed”. The phrase “a whole breed” could be pretty
loaded. Artists who put money and position before art? Scottish Tories?
There is considerable range in The Lost Leader: trains, ships, wars,
regiments, drink (see especially “Empty Tumbler” and “John Imlah” for
epigrammatic artistry). “Rosebery”, ostensibly about the Prime Minister who
also happened to be the richest man in Scotland, turns out to be an
ambitious piece spoken by a journalist with the unlikely name of Modicum:
It was a new thing then, the interview,
brought from America, like women
smoking,
but hardly subversive, yet . . .
Similarly conversational blank verse is used in “Stephen Boyd”:
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 . . . .
It touches on two different kinds of Scottishness:
You a Glaswegian from the Irish side;
Me, from the softer suburbs of the Kirk . . . .
Stephen Boyd died too young, in 1995 (not 1999), and was a popular lecturer
with students in the School of English at St Andrews. Imlah’s poem in his
memory is an elegy, one forbidding mourning, and unusually personal and
straightforward with it.
Nothing, or very little, of Imlah’s characteristic humour and sense of play is
sacrificed. He is masterly at shifting in and out of colloquial and more
elevated tones and styles, an accomplishment I consider characteristic of
contemporary poetry at its best. Some unfashionable, under-read poetry has
helped him, including Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Kipling and Housman. Not
all of the poems are concerned with Scottishness. “Gray’s Elegy”, for
instance, suggests that one of the most famous poems in the language is now
familiar only to the elderly, while its status as a poem and a quarry for
titles of novels goes overlooked in favour of biography.
There’s a jaunty hauntedness, too, in “Afterlives of the Poets”, “my phantom
Tennyson Centenary project” as Imlah calls Part One in a prose note. Two
forms associated with Tennyson are employed, the In Memoriam stanza, and
long lines reminiscent of “Locksley Hall” and early parts of “Maud”. Part
Two, “B.V.”, conjures up the sorry life and career of James Thomson, that
alcoholic visionary of dark things. “It’s a free-for-all”, he writes in Part
Three, appearing to suggest the “afterlives of the poets” as random, “busts
with broken noses”, and posterity, like all of history, perhaps, liable to
forgetfulness unless preserved carefully and kept free of error.
Mick Imlah
THE LOST LEADER
144pp. Faber. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 571 24307 5
Douglas Dunn’s New Selected Poems: 1964–1999 appeared in 2003. He is
the editor of The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, 1995.
