Book description
Mick Imlah's second and long-awaited collection The Lost Leader was
published to acclaim in 2008, shortly before his early death in
January 2009. The present retrospect connects the work of three
decades, drawing upon Imlah's earlier full-length collection,
Birthmarks (1988), but also including uncollected poems and previously
unpublished work. The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize and revealed a
poet of dazzling virtuosity, eloquence and subtlety - breaking
through, as Imlah said of Edwin Muir (whose poems he selected in his
last year) 'to a field of unforced imaginative fluency and an
unexpected common cause'. Edited by Mark Ford and with an essay by
Alan Hollinghurst, the Selected Poems brings together the best work of
a poet who can now be seen, with increasing clarity, as a 'lost
leader' of Scottish poetry in our time.
Mick Imlah was born in 1956 and brought up near Glasgow and in Kent.
He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught as a Junior
Fellow. He was editor of Poetry Review from 1983 to 1986, and worked at
the Times Literary Supplement from 1992. His poems appeared in The
Zoologist's Bath (1982), Birthmarks (1988), Penguin New Poets 3 (1994)
and Diehard (2006). He edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
(with Robert Crawford, 2000) and made selections for Faber of the poems
of Tennyson and Edwin Muir. He died in 2009.
