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Friday 5 December 2008

The Lost Leader

Flowers of Scotland

Dinah Roe on a new collection from Mike Imlah

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!

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