Mick Imlah’s first collection, Birthmarks, announced the arrival of an unusual talent – in 1988. Imlah’s poems have made occasional appearances, in the TLS and elsewhere, since then. He was several times rumoured to have “almost finished” a new book – to be called The Lost Leader. For once the words “eagerly awaited” did, when used of this phantom volume, express a genuine sense of anticipation. This was more than justified when the book finally appeared, earlier this year. Ambitiously conceived and ingeniously executed, it attracted unanimous praise for bravura displays of technical skill, imaginative flair and verbal exuberance.

The TLS’s reviewer was Douglas Dunn, an older contemporary of Imlah’s, a fellow-Scot and one of the finest of poet-war poets. He seized immediately on the sense that Imlah, bypassing those much-fancied twentieth-century voices that have audibly influenced most new poetry, had taken his lead from Victorians such as Tennyson and Browning, and placed himself in an even older tradition. "If, as verse, Imlah’s writing has panache, as poetry it frequently has power to provoke or move", writes Dunn, with his "nifty rhymes . . . and a narrative skill in verse worthy of Scott and Byron"; "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".

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