Island Life
I live on an island.
But that’s not the worst part.
Water sloshes uncontrollably at the edges of this entire geological formation.
You can hardly go anyplace without falling off.
Julie O’Callaghan
formance 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 halfforgotten 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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