Since Mick Imlah's death on January 12, there have been various obituaries and tributes to him.

Obituaries appeared in the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph and the Scotsman. Fiona Sampson and Andrew Motion also wrote about him in the Guardian. The Culture Show on BBC2 featured the poet and his work in December. Poetry Matters also published a tribute.

The Editor of the TLS, Peter Stothard, wrote in his blog about his memories of Mick Imlah and about his funeral.

This appreciation appeared in the NB column in the TLS of January 16.

Mick Imlah, who has died aged fifty-two, was a poet, poetry editor and highly popular member of the TLS staff. His final year was mired in debilitating illness, which he bore with almost military fortitude, but it was also a time of literary triumph. In the spring of 2008, Faber issued Imlah’s second full collection of poems, The Lost Leader. In October, it was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection, rewarding an effort that had occupied more than a decade.

Over the years, Mick wrote a substantial amount of literary criticism, most of it published in the TLS. The centre of his enthusiasm gradually migrated from English literature of the nineteenth century – the voices of Browning and Tennyson are marked in his poetry – to Scotland, where he was born (the family moved south when he was ten). Typically, he had a liking for writers who had dropped out of fashion. His essays on Barrie, Crockett, Buchan and – a particular love – Scott deserve to be collected.

His first contributions to the paper came in 1982. In the same year, he made his debut as a poet, with a pamphlet, The Zoologist’s Bath and other adventures, published by the small Sycamore Press of Oxford. It was run by the poet and Oxford don John Fuller, who was perhaps the closest Mick had to a mentor. In this little sheaf of unnumbered pages, he tested the forms that continued to serve him: dramatic monologue and narrative, with literary allusion, personal opinion and gothic incident mixed in the same pot.

Mick was often to be seen at his desk, after hours or at weekends, endlessly revising the verse that would make up The Lost Leader. He seldom spoke about work-in-progress; rather, he liked to talk about sport. He played rugby and cricket, passionately following the fortunes of Scotland in the former, and of England (dispassionately) in the latter. To say that we miss the sight of him curling his forelock while deep in a piece of writing, or editing, is to make an inadequate gesture in the direction of his absence.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now