Selected Poems of Mick Imlah

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upon Imlah's earlier full-length collection, Birthmarks (1988), but also including uncollected poems and previously unpublished work.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 (1956-2009) was born and brought up near Glasgow and in Kent. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he subsequently taught as a Junior Fellow. He was editor of Poetry Review from 1983-6, and then Poetry Editor at the Times Literary Supplement for sixteen years 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. His final collection, The Lost Leader, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008.