Mick Imlah’s poems and reviews began appearing in the TLS in the 1980s, and he was the paper’s Poetry editor from the early 1990s until his death this week. He showed the same unerring incisiveness and perfectionism in prose – and when attending to other people’s reviews and poems – as he did in his own highly acclaimed collections, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader, the fruit of the intervening twenty years’ work which won the Forward, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot, Prizes last year. We present here a selection of his work in verse and prose from the masterful early “Tusking” (see below) to "Rosebery", published last year.

We have also compiled a page of obituaries and tributes.

Tusking

In Africa once
A herd of Harrow
Elephants strayed
Far from their bunks;
Leather, they lay
Their costly trunks
And ears of felt
Down on the veldt.

All forgot
The creep of dusk:
A moonbeam stole
Along each tusk;
Snores and sighs.
Oh foolish boys!
The English Elephant
Never lies!

*

In the night-time, lithe
Shadows with little
Glinting teeth
Whisked tusks away;
Drew through the dark
Branches of ivory,
Made a great hue
On their rapid run.

Hunters, at home
They curl up the bare
Soles of their feet
With piano-pleasure;
Sammy plays
A massacre song
With the notes wrong
On Massa's baby.

Out in the bush
Is silence now;
Savannah seas
Have islands now;
Smelly land-masses,
Bloody, cold,
Disfigured places
With fly-blown faces.

And each of us rests
After his fashion;
Elephant, English,
Butcher, Bushman;
Now only the herding
Boy in a singlet
Worries his goat
With a peaceful prod.

*

But if, one night
As you stroll the verandah
Observing with wonder
The place of the white
Specks 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!

"Tusking" by Mick Imlah was first published in the TLS of March 14, 1986.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now