IMLAH, Mick

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: 1956. Education: Magdalen College, Oxford. Career: Founding editor, Oxford Poetry, 1983; editor, Poetry Review, 1983–86; poetry editor, Chatto and Windus, 1989–93.

Publications

Poetry

The Zoologist's Bath and Other Adventures. Oxford, Sycamore Press, 1982.

Birthmarks. London, Chatto and Windus, 1988.

Other

Editor, Dr. Wortle's School, by Anthony Trollope. London, Penguin, 1999.

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Critical Study: By Robert Potts, in Times Literary Supplement (London), 4814, 1995.

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There is a feeling conveyed by many of Mick Imlah's poems of listening to a skilled if quirky saloon raconteur. The poem "Goldilocks," for example, begins with "This is a story about the possession of beds" and goes on to tell how the narrator enters a room in Oxford to find a tramp already occupying the bed. The story chats on to embrace a jokey mention of the narrator's earlier having read a paper at the "Annual Excuse for Genetics to let down its ringlets," extending the reference to the poem's title and the tramp's hair. The poem ends with the clincher "Och, if he'd known I was Scottish! Then I'd have got it," which would get the beer sippers rocking appreciatively.

Some of the other stories, such as "Lee Ho Fook's," seem a might inconsequential. It is as if the narrator himself had lost his way momentarily in the labyrinth of his story, all of which only adds to the verisimilitude of the genre. The essential difference is, of course, Imlah's narrative skills in making pointed asides. Also important are the qualities of his language and metaphor, as in these lines from "Goldilocks":

   Whose snore, like the rattle of bronchial stones in a bucket,
   Resounded the length and depth and breadth of the
   problem.

One has the sense in reading these poems of being buttonholed by an Ancient Mariner, one who prevents escape from the story. "Till hush!" the reader is exhorted in "Secrets":

      she let her dress
   Unbutton to the locket
   And parted secrets.

This uses all of the poet's economy of language and ambiguity.

From time to time a less relaxed Imlah appears, as in "Silver" and "Starter's Orders," where, no longer softened by rhetoric, the poems hit straight and hard. The following lines are from "Silver":

   Wherever the ship may steer
   They face the rear;
   What lies in store
   Is untransmuted ore.

Imlah's poetry also can be intricately imaginative, as in his long extravaganza "The Zoologist's Bath," based on the evolutionary theory of the Victorian Arthur Woolmer, whose thesis was that life would strive to return to the seas from which it had evolved:

               —when I feel
   My bottom buoyed, and start to think of fish.
   I am at one with them;

Yes, Imlah can be both witty and sharp.

—John Cotton