This review is taken from the TLS of October 28, 1988.

Mick Imlah's Birthmarks, unusually for a first volume of poems, sounds distinctly like itself. There are no obvious contemporary or even modern influences, and the book has the courage of its own singularity, even oddity. This derives primarily from an entirely un-imagist trust in the power and persuasiveness of a flexible syntax: Imlah is usually in impressive control of subtle periodic structures moulded or energetically hammered into metrical shape. He has a pre-modernist vibrancy and gusto, a far greater relish for the shape and sound of a sentence than for the particular precision of an image; and his essential form is the dramatic monologue, handled with a resourceful, intelligent quirkiness. If anyone is brought to mind by these poems, it is Robert Browning.

Some of Imlah's speakers could almost have been Browning's, in particular the eccentric evolutionist Arthur William Woolmer, who speaks part of the long concluding poem, "The Zoologist's Bath"; and one or two – "Jealously", for instance, and "Her Version" – have the directly engaged immediacy and conversational disruptiveness of the monk in "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister". Others are peculiarly modern cases – an easily perturbed non-racist and non-sexist; an anxious, fantasizing insomniac; even an aborted foetus. These monologues are accompanied in Birthmarks by a number of "narrative" poems or fictions in which exceptional events, humorous and minatory, are recounted in ways which both moralize and unsettle. "Goldilocks" turns on the aggression and guilt of its narrator, a Scottish student (or don?) at Oxford, who discovers a tramp of his own nationality in his bed; and "Lee Ho Fook's" is an amazing yarn about how the owner of a "fabulous restaurant" is saved by a building worker from being scalded by a vat of tea; offering him a free meal in return, he ends up feeding involuntarily for years.

What matters in "Lee Ho Fook's" is, first of all, the exuberant panache with which the story is told, the fecundity and memorableness of its descriptive details, the liveliness and believability of its reported speech. When the wily navvy first surmises his luck, for instance, "a sluice and an avalanche opened of rice and prawns like the coins in The Golden Shot / Churning and pouring forever and all of it aimed at his lap". But the story is also a little morality tale of the souring of gratitude and the abuse of reward, of privileged grace and favour being met with the ungrateful, unservile mercenariness of the under-privileged. Many of Imlah's poems run their playful, ingenious descants on themes which it is almost too banal or earnest to insist have real social urgency; but it seems essential to their interest that they draw such disparate energies imaginatively together. Their verbal, rhythmic, syntactical and fictional vivacity, and their jokey literary allusiveness and pastiche, enforce genuinely new kinds of confrontation with such matters as alcoholism, African post-colonialism, racism and inter-cultural confusions.

"Cockney", for instance, offers the spectacle of an upwardly mobilized musician at a party after his performance of a musical skit ("My Way – in the Setting for Tuba by Mahler") suddenly and inexplicably incapable of preventing himself lapsing into the demotic. The shock and embarrassment of it are signalled by the upper case, and the extravagant rhymes might almost be Paul Muldoon in the setting for tuba:

ALL ROYT MOY SAHN! HA'S YOR FARVAH?
LEN YOU TEN NOWTS? – CALL IT A FOIVAH!
TRAVELLED IN TEE-ASCANY? – DO ME A FIVAH!

The gross knockabout, which eventually includes two-thirds of a purple salami protruding through the narrator's shirtfront, is a hilarious but also revealing approach to the grotesque tragi-comedy of stifling English class-consciousness. And "Tusking" sets post-colonial Africa glancingly and obliquely inside a short fantasy sequence about elephant-hunting. Not all of Mick Imlah's work is so assured: in particular, the adventurous syntax can occasionally contort bafflingly; but the final vignette of "Tusking" may suggest how, at his best, he is already a poet of striking originality and cunning, a genuinely distinctive voice in the murmur and babble of the contemporary:

But if, one night
As you stroll the verandah
Observing with wonder
The place of the white
Stars in the universe,
Brilliant, and clear,
Sipping your whisky
And pissed with fear

You happen to hear
Over the tinkle
Of ice and Schubert
A sawing – a drilling –
The bellow and trump
Of a vast pain –
Pity the hulks!
Play it again!

Mick Imlah
BIRTHMARKS
61pp. Chatto and Windus. £4.95.
0 7011 3358 9

Neil Corcoran is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Elizabeth Bowen: The enforced return, 2004.

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