Mick Imlah (1956-2009)

Mick Imlah’s early death takes away from contemporary British poetry one of its very brightest talents.  In a situation so conspicuously without many kinds of comfort, the fact that Mick’s work was awarded such widespread acclaim over the last year affords at least a crumb of satisfaction. 

The author of The Lost Leader was – as admirers of that book will not be surprised to learn – a man of exceptional literary and poetic sense: his tastes were catholic, and his judgements sane.  The reach and humour of his work, like its emotional power and profundity of invention,  were qualities allied to the best kind of humane understanding.  It will be much remarked that Mick was a perfectionist, and of course that is true: the memory persists of a protracted and anxious editorial wait long ago at Oxford Poetry for a pledged Imlah poem, our catching a glimpse of it, then losing it to the author again, several times, before the final item could be sent – Tippex still wet – to the printers on the Cowley Road.  But if Mick was a literary perfectionist, that was because he had good reason to be, capable as he was in his writing of something which seemed then – and seems still – to be disconcertingly close to perfection. 

A kind of integrity was involved in all this which is not, and probably never was, exactly fashionable – and certainly isn’t immediately helpful for a poetic career.  Mick was, on the other hand, very much involved with the poetic world of his time; and the sheer intelligence of that involvement is evident in the accomplishments of his career as a journalist and editor, just as it informs the sparkling, ironic depths of his poetry.  In a world cursed by factions, Mick was no factional figure or force: again, this is an index of the genuineness of his talents.  Much will be said about the power and distinctiveness of Mick’s poetry, for a long time to come; and these qualities will go on proving themselves in more than just what is said about them, for a poet of his resources – technical as well as imaginative – will always be able to charge new poets with exactly the kinds of energy and impetus all real originality requires. 

To speak personally, I am enormously proud to have known and sometimes worked with Mick, both in the 1980s in the world of small magazines and more recently, when he was an intuitive and inspirational commissioning editor at the TLS; proud, too, to have been able to bring Tower Poetry’s help to the publication by the Clutag Press of his chapbook Diehard (2006) – my first sight of some of the poems which were to go into The Lost Leader the following year.  The achievement of that collection, alongside his 1988 volume Birthmarks, is a permanent one.  In lamenting that Mick’s own transitoriness as a human being had to be proved so soon, and so cruelly, by the disease that snatched him away, this permanence sounds its own, sure and certain, note of triumph.

- Peter McDonald