On January 12, 2009, the English poet and editor Mick Imlah died at age 52. He was the author of two books, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008). After graduating from Oxford with a first (top grade) in 1979, Imlah helped revive Oxford Poetry. He became poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. As Mark Ford notes in his Guardian obituary, “Imlah was in fact blessed not only with astonishing literary talent, but with the looks of a movie star. He was, in addition, a formidable amateur rugby and cricket player; both sports feature often in his poems.”
Poetry Review in 1986.
Imlah was fortunate in the other literary friends he made during his time at Oxford; his circle included the novelists Alan Hollinghurst, John Lanchester and Isabel Fonseca, and the poet Bernard O’Donoghue. He graduated with a first in 1979, and embarked on a DPhil on Arthurian legends in Victorian poetry. This was never submitted, but his research into the work of Tennyson and Browning is easily discernible in his early poems, which make clever use of the dramatic monologue. The title poem of his first pamphlet, The Zoologist’s Bath, published in 1982, mingles fantasy and fact in a manner that would become a hallmark of Imlah’s poetry: it recreates the life of an eccentric Victorian evolutionary theorist, who is convinced mankind will soon return to its original element, the sea; he therefore refuses to get out of the bath, imagining he is developing a fin.
In 1983 Imlah, along with the Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins and the poets Peter McDonald and Elise Paschen, set about reviving the long dormant magazine Oxford Poetry. So began a 25-year career in editing and literary journalism. That autumn he was appointed, with Tracy Warr, co-editor of Poetry Review, succeeding Andrew Motion. In 1989 he took over from Motion again, this time as poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, a post he held for four years. From 1993 he was poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement; it was characteristic of his absolute devotion to the business of editing and publishing the poetry of others that he insisted on vetting contributions and judging the TLS poetry competition even in the final stages of his illness. >>>
from the archive; first posted 5/18/09
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Author: The Best American Poetry
