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His verse takes issue with Edwin Muir, but his new selection of Muir’s poems extends the olive branch. His introduction includes not only the sweep of Muir’s career and critical reception, but provides a poet’s insight into the methods of a fellow artist. He describes ‘how his imagination will snag, stop, then press on again in some version of the same direction’. Muir was born in Deerness, Orkney, in 1887, but economic necessity forced his family to migrate to the industrial inferno of early 20th- century Glasgow. Muir’s work was shaped by his own ‘personal myth’, which involves a ‘Fall’ from his Edenic early boyhood. His verse exhibits the ‘timeless, placeless and impersonal formulae of a dream’, as in ‘The Myth’:
My childhood all a myth
Enacted is a distant isle;
Time with his hourglass and his scythe
Stood dreaming on the dial.
Like Milngavie-bred Imlah, Muir eventually left Scotland for England, where he became an academic, poet and novelist. Best known today for his post- apocalyptic poem ‘The Horses’, the prolific Muir’s star has faded. ‘No one would now suggest that our estimate of the poems improves the more of them we read. Muir benefits … from being read in selection’, Imlah notes dryly. The majority of poems selected here were written after Muir turned 50, when his work is ‘looser round the edges, more relaxed and capable in its traffic with externals’. Highlights are: ‘The Commemoration’; ‘Suburban Dream’; ‘The Face; ‘Double Absence’; ‘The Late Wasp’; ‘The Horses’ and ‘The Bird’.
Muir’s observation that ‘the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man’, informs Imlah’s own poems, which often use individual mythologies to reflect on collective experience. Stubbornly local characters transcend their boundaries, like ‘The Ayrshire Orpheus’ who journeys to Hades to sing for the return of his ‘bonny lass’. In ‘The Queen’s Mairies’ an old woman in a Dumfries bus depot channels Browning and Keats: ‘If we don’t have larks — we nurse instead / internal nightingales…’. Medieval and Hollywood legends jostle for position in ‘Wizard’, a winning combination of the bible, the Round Table and The Wizard of Oz:
Through the poor trees of Rhymer’s Wood
that was,
Merlin has run to his moulting cage, to moult:
‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?’
— Because because because because because!
It is not only black humour and anachronism which reanimate these half- forgotten figures; like the conjurers he writes about, Imlah dazzles us with flashing surfaces which conceal prodigious technical depths. His blank verse springs so conversationally off the page that it’s easy to overlook the carefully controlled metre, while his rhymes, whether perched brazenly at the end of a line or lingering internally, consistently surprise and delight. It takes the confidence of a mature poet to get away with rhyming ‘MacDougall’, ‘Ishiguro’ and ‘Google’, or ‘jacuzzi’ with ‘Pusey’. He is funny, but never glib; his humour only intensifies tragedy, particularly in the more personal poems of the volume’s second half, such as the deeply moving ‘Stephen Boyd’. Imlah also has a talent for crafting a memorable image, as in ‘Flower of Scotland’, which describes ‘The moment the Bruce appears from the priory, panting, / His sword in bloom, ‘Comyn … the Red … is killt!’, or ‘The Queen’s Maries’ with ‘all the little girls / or not so little, ganging upstairs in a spiral / of swear words, text-tones, midriff and brutal candy.’
Minor niggles are with Imlah’s occasional obscurity. Some of these poems assume too much about the reader’s background in Scottish particulars. But perhaps that is the point: we are expected to recognise Keats, Tennyson and Camelot, so why not Lugbe and Baithine or the Selkirk Ladies and Gala Girls?
As tenacious and playful as the diehard terrier of ‘Domestic’, Imlah’s poems demonstrate that ‘the spring of a well-constructed Scot / is still surprising’. This volume, and the Edwin Muir selection trailing in its wake, mark Imlah’s return as a ‘lost leader’ of Scottish poetry.
Dinah Roe’s new edition of Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems is published by Penguin Classics at £9.99.
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