Flowers of Scotland
Dinah Roe
THE LOST LEADER by Mick Imlah Faber, £9.99, pp. 126, ISBN 9780571243075 ✆ £7.90 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 EDWIN MUIR: SELECTED POEMS edited by Mick Imlah Faber, £12.99, pp. 82, ISBN 9780571235476 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The Lost Leader is Mick Imlah’s first collection in 20 years, following Birthmarks in 1988, and it is well worth the wait. It takes in everyone from Saint Columba to John Knox, with appearances from William Wallace, medieval alchemist Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and rugby hero Gordon Brown. But this is no dewyeyed tribute to national glories past.
Like Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’, which lamented the political conservatism of the aging Wordsworth, Imlah’s verse is in no mood for po-faced reverence. Wallace, for example, is drawn and quartered in four lines:
This done, the moon went overhead; The bell of Mary Magdalen Struck one; and smartly off he sped In several directions.
The fleshy heart of Robert the Bruce, taken on the Crusades as a holy relic, delivers this heroic couplet on the battlefield: ‘Get tae hell, ya Saracen git! / Mohammit gangs tae bed wi’ a dummy tit!’ One thing Imlah’s leaders have not lost is their sense of humour.
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 20thcentury 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 postapocalyptic 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 per
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