Mick Imlah Lost Leader Main

'No poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people's songs, the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie,' proposed Edwin Muir. Yet many of the poems in Mick Imlah's brilliantly conceived new collection do take the most over-worn of Scottish myths as their apparent starting points: Saint Columba and the medieval wizard Michael Scot; the Wallace and the Bruce; Queen Mary and John Knox; the Bonnie Prince (pivotal Lost Leader of the title), Robert Burns and Walter Scott; the Scots Greys and Gordon Highlanders; whisky, Clydeside, football.Imlah's approach to this folklore is so fresh, however, and the results so unlikely, that the whole resembles a lost poetic history of the nation brought to light - a modern, sardonic but devout rendering of the matter of Scotland: from A.D. 500, by way of a guided tour of Iona, to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot. Conversely, as the chronicle reaches the twentieth century, it seems to act out a more individual or personal or English purpose; but the poems here of self, friends and family are no less enthralled by sporting and military fantasy, by the charm of the past and the power of anachronism, than their predecessors.

Features poems about friends and family - childhood reminiscences, elegies and celebrations - influenced by sporting and military fantasy, the charm of history and the power of anachronism.