In The Lost Leader Mick Imlah has produced an extraordinary full volume of exuberant poems, where the technicalities of verse – poetic forms, rhythm and rhyme – are handled with a seemingly casual effortlessness which signals a poetic talent rare, true and substantial.  It is a legitimate part of reviewing to express wonder and delight but the reviewer is always tempted, too, to seek for explanation.  Here Imlah triumphantly answers Edwin Muir’s proscription of all the most tired Scottish stories and histories, revivifying even the most clichéd: the Scottish Tourist Board would do well to ask what Imlah can do for shortbread and the kilt, though it is likely that the Board would find the answers somewhat disconcerting.  One wonders whether Imlah can write in the way he does because his adult life – as a student in Oxford and then a journalist in London – has left him free of the pressures of the Disneyfied, eco-kailyard which Scotland, too full of itself for its own good, has become.   Ironically, Imlah is able to write of things Scottish without having any agenda to be a Scottish poet.

Scottish history back to ‘the year dot’ is reviewed in an anachronistic colloquial idiom, full of linguistic play, irreverent and at times irrelevant, a highly entertaining load of muck, in fact.  The first poem ‘Muck’ is a wonderful, fishy story of a Christian mission, ridding itself of ‘the Ulster roof-/and-cake mentality’ to arrive mistakenly on Muck rather than Mull, where a slow St Kevin is determined to identify Christian significance – ‘“That’s one/ of our symbols”…’ – in the fishy art and workmen’s and tourists’ leavings to be found there.  In the end, though ‘our code forbids’ its expression, they are relieved to get back in their boat, hailing the pagan goddess Astarte redefined, with dogged literalism, as ‘mother of false starts’.  The reader is left wondering whether Father Ted, and, more particularly, Dougal, were not members of the expedition.   The prophetic St Columba, the dragon-slaying Fergus of Galloway, the Medieval mathematician and astrologer, Michael Scot (with a dunce’s peaked cap borrowed from his namesake and subsequently transformed into a conical loudhailer), a slew of Balliol grandees reaching back to the College’s Scottish founder, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, are all treated to diversely inventive but similarly revivifying humour.

A master of poetic conventions, Imlah is unconstrained by any other conventions, including those of literary politics.  Yes, he treats of Scottish matters, but that doesn’t prevent him treating of other things too.   So, for example, a wonderful poetic sequence on Tennyson sits adjacent to an equally wonderful sequence on James (‘B.V.’) Thomson.  Personal experiences, historical figures, literary antecedents, races, nationalities, rugby, religions are all mixed up and all shaken up.  Imlah’s exuberance spills beyond the poems themselves to his use of epigraphs, as in the wonderfully sardonic juxtaposition which prefaces ‘The Queen’s Maries’:

There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton
Mary Carmichael and me.
– ANON.

Ye are na Mary Morison.
– BURNS.

(Another epigraph has Tennyson not allowing the poet’s son Oscar Browning to be ‘Browning’.)  Such an effect is typical of the collection.  Things are never what they seem nor what readers might expect them to be. The unifying theme of this collection is diversion – diversion as entertainment, but also diversion in the sense of repeatedly taking readers down the road never previously taken, the provocation of going astray.  So just as those missionaries arrived on Muck rather than Mull, the brave heart of Robert the Bruce, en route to Jerusalem, gets lost amidst a Moorish battle in Spain.  At a local textual level, this is to be heard in the way that the most familiar of phrases - the ‘red rag’, the notion of ‘being history’, ‘the royal infirmary’, the ‘urgent business of the heart’ for example – mean something entirely different when Imlah deploys them.  Above all, perhaps, there is Imlah’s wayward way with rhyme.  So ‘Othello’ rhymes with ‘Portobello’, ‘Kathleen Jamie’ with ‘pay me’, ‘Ishiguro’ with ‘o’er the moor, O’ and so on…  The modish word to use of such rhyming is ‘transgressive’; the more straightforward one ‘outrageous’.

Yet The Lost Leader is as remote from Muldoonian free-association – to which it might appear to bear an initial and superficial similarity – as it is possible to get.  Imlah’s startling effects and associations, his imaginative twistings and turnings, always have point or edge and might often leave readers feeling edgy.  One brief poem must illustrate such a claim:

I don’t know to what breed you refer
– Brief Encounter

Empty Tumbler

I met in the saloon bar
A colonel, rheumy eyed,
Shouting at the batman
No longer by his side.

Mars without his war-toys
Was not so choleric
As that pensioned officer
Missing his ‘Merrick!’ –

This poem is disconcerting and a number of things take a tumble here.  How much damage does this do to Hugh MacDiarmid?  Can MacDiarmid ever recover?  What is Scottish poetry, so much of which is at present lost in rural rheumy eyed musings on the post-colonial ‘from Unst to Luss’ (as Robert Crawford has it) to do with this rude reminder that Scotland is mired in Empire?  Glasgow was, after all, the British (Scottish?) Empire’s second city and the reference to Merrick here is presumably not to the Elephant Man but to the working-class Merrick of The Jewel in the Crown.  The reviews of The Lost Leader have been rightly and univocally admiring but many also seem a little lost, diverted from the well-trodden roads of poetry criticism, not knowing quite what to make of it.  That in itself is evidence that The Lost Leader is triumphantly doing its work.

Like other poets in 2008, Robert Crawford is unlucky in coinciding with Imlah’s collection.  The juxtaposition brings what have always been the limitations of Crawford’s poetry more fully into relief.  Crawford’s verse tries too hard and thus can prove trying.  Aiming for either wit or wisdom, too often it finds whimsy.  Technically, Crawford is too fond of the short line and the short stanza as a mechanical means to claim ‘significance’: gnomic utterances are usually best left to gnomes.  Crawford’s Scotland is unrelievedly devoid of the urban and too often reads like an application for an EU subsidy.  Even when out of Scotland, writing ‘postcard poetry’, he studiously avoids the cities, and poems like ‘Wyoming’ are so predictably politically correct as to provoke the reader to pick a fight.  Here the poet celebrates his daughter dancing in a two-hundred year old tepee ring and thus celebrates an implicit kinship with her Native American sisters.  But what about some other child, one wonders, who might as easily be playing in a cowboy hat and slinging his toy gun?  And what about present day Native Americans, stuck on their reservation, some considerable distance down a dirt track from this touristic tepee attraction, with only a liquor store for consolation?

Another poem, ‘Cooled Britannia’, a dramatic monologue purporting to be Tony Blair’s farewell speech to his native land, leaves this reader completely baffled:

The hour approaches.  Check your fly.
It’s almost time to do or die.
All Scotland knows England expects
No independence.  Sacred texts
Are trotted out: Neighbours, Macbeth,
Our glorious canon. […
.          . . . .]
Forget those loans, forget Iraq –
I was the one won Scotland back!
Aye, now’s the day, and now’s the hour!
Vote! Vote!  Remember Brown and Blair!

Is this satire or admiration?  The kind of rhyming going on here is inconsistent (hour/Blair?  Wouldn’t ‘and now’s the noon!/ … Remember Blair and Broon!’ be better, at the cost (cost?) of losing ‘Scots wha hae’?  As it is, it’s laboured, but it ain’t Labour).   Line-division and caesurae are working against what one assumes to be intended as tub-thumping couplets.  Moreover, it is impossible to get a grip on this poem because it is inconceivable that Blair, the man in the ‘too tight shoes’ as another poet devastatingly has it, could ever speak in this way: even allowing for the stretch of parody or pastiche, poetic licence is overdrawn.

The most interesting poems in Full Volume are the poems concerned with a shift from the written word (or, better still, oral culture) to more recent technologies of communication: broadband, satnav, the laptop, the internet chatroom, photograph, and film.  Preferring the ‘warm pub in St Andrews’ to ‘the global village’ and more at home in the archives than on Facebook, Crawford is perhaps finding a distinctive voice as the grumpy old elegist of the shift from a verbal to a visual culture, enlarging more gloomily on a theme initiated by Edwin Morgan.

Crawford’s will-to-Scottish-poetry appears most clearly in his translations from the Gaelic.  Having no Gaelic, this reader is not qualified to comment on the quality of these poems.  Perhaps, however, some of Crawford’s own comments are illuminating: ‘… which I found in Alexander Carmichael’s parallel text…’; ‘I am grateful to Meg Bateman who read the poem aloud to me and discussed it.’  Is Crawford implicitly advocating emulation of the bilingualism of Wales here – welshing on his native land, seriously imagining a situation – say twenty years hence – when a Falkirk housewife will turn to a Falkirk househusband at the nursery gates and ask ‘Ur yoo sendin’ yir wee Senga and Brittney tae the Gaelic-speaking school?’  At least, however, the reader can have the glorious consolation of trying to imagine what a Mick Imlah poem on the subject would sound like.

Mick Imlah, The Lost Leader, Faber and Faber, 2008.  £9.99. ISBN 978-0571243075
Robert Crawford, Full Volume, Jonathan Cape, 2008. £9.00. ISBN 978-022408087

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.