Mick Imlah: Poet acclaimed for the thematic range and exuberance of his work

When his first full-length book, Birthmarks (1988), was given a Recommendation by the Poetry Book Society, Mick Imlah wrote about the poems, "Formally, I hope they are respectably turned out, in their various measures; to write verse effectively I think you have to be practically unconscious with inspiration". And he went on to declare "a duty to the reader ... that poetry should at least try to be exciting to read."

Given the characteristic modesty and diffidence exemplified in those observations (the poet will hope, he will at least try), Imlah may not have realised just how much the new poems he subsequently published in magazines, all too rarely, were valued. Fellow poets read them with admiration, and some envy, for their craftsmanship, and readers found in them the excitement Imlah believed poetry ought to cause. But he kept all of them waiting 20 years for his magnificent second – and last – book.

His heartbreakingly early death, at the age of 52, deprives us of someone who showed not only abounding talent but also scrupulous care and continual dignity in his practice of theart. That first volume, preceded only by the startlingly brilliant six-poem pamphlet The Zoologist's Bath and other Adventures (1982) – which featured some inspired free verse of veryconscious oddity, had been eight years in the making. He had already won,in 1984, an Eric Gregory award,given by the Society of Authors to promising British poets under 30; for once, the stock publisher's phrase about a "long-awaited" book seemed amply justified.

Later there was to be a selection of mainly familiar poems in Penguin Modern Poets 3 (1995), and another small booklet, Diehard, in 2006. But there was only the one further full collection: The Lost Leader (2008). Quickly assembled following the diagnosis of his motor neurone disease in autumn 2007, it contained all the unpublished work of the previous 20 years he wished to retain, 58 poems of immense variety and technical resource. It was incontestably the best volume of verse to appear in 2008, and reached the shortlists for the T.S. Eliot and Forward prizes.

The poet's courageous attendance – he was by then very gravely ill – on the occasion last October when he received the Forward was to be the last time he appeared in public.His reputation will thus rest, securely, on some 80 pieces, all adroitly crafted and original in the treatment of subjects both bizarre or ordinary, frequently rather disconcerting, and altogether his own.

Imlah was born in Aberdeen in 1956 (with a twin sister, Fiona). The family lived in Milngavie, a village just outside Glasgow, where Imlah attended the local primary school. In 1966 they moved south to Beckenham, on the Kentish edge of London, and his next school was Hawes Down primary in West Wickham. From there he passed on to Dulwich College, and in 1976won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor, thepoet and novelist John Fuller, was a crucial influence on his development as a poet. Fuller would later remark that Imlah had been the most astonishingly intelligent of a succession of remarkable students to pass through his hands.

At Magdalen he excelled in sports as well as academically, making first-team appearances in cricket andfootball, and captaining the college rugby union side (a line in The Lost Leader referring to rugby as "the perversion I was public-schooled in" is not to be taken seriously). He obtained a First in final schools in 1979, and an academic career might have proved tempting – he had two spells, from 1984 to 1985 and between 1986 and 1988 as a junior lecturer in English literature. But there was a strong competing temptation; that of the literary journalist's life in London.

The Zoologist's Bath was produced by John Fuller on his hand-operated Sycamore Press in 1982. The nightmarish (yet still very funny) title poem and "Quasimodo says Goodnight"are extended fantasies done in a Browningesque vein, the work of a poet immersed in Victorian poetry who was later to champion Tennyson in a collection he selected for Penguin in 2004.

The other four poems are set in a weird present-day where "Insomnia", "A Brawl in Co Kerry", "Jealousy" and "Abortion" are simultaneously quite real and frighteningly dreamlike. From the latter:

Uncurled at noon
As dry as a Dead Sea Scroll, I rose and wobbled
Blank about the cabin like a reclaimed monster
Learning to eat; and through a glassy disk
Saw even passage, sun, unpoisoning sea,
And heard the call of sea-birds hosting me
To port, and hatched an eagerness for dusk
And drink, and company...

If that suggests a "morning after" on shipboard more than an abortion, it is because drink and its observed effects are recurrent themes in Imlah's poetry; the poem called "Birthmark" (in the book Birthmarks) is a laconically ominous study of alcoholic decline, placed purposefully just before a wild sequence titled "The Drinking Race."

Imlah and Tracey Warr were appointed joint editors of the quarterly Poetry Review in succession to Andrew Motion in 1983, and subsequently, until 1986, Imlah was soleeditor, showing a flair for devisingoriginal themes and an alert eyefor new talent. There was a spell as poetry editor at Chatto and Windus between 1989 and 1993, after which he joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement, where he had responsibility for commissioning reviews of books on Ireland and archaeology as well as new verse.

Just occasionally he would venture an appearance at a poetry festival, as at Struga, in what was then Yugoslavia, in 1990; or take on a creative writing course with school pupils. All this time he was writing poems which he mostly held back until he felt ready to shape them into a coherent collection.

Hardly anything about Birthmarks prepared readers for the sheer technical and thematic range of The Lost Leader. "Namely" reveals that "IMLACH was what my family... had originally been,/Gaelic for those of the loch." A large number of these poems – among them the elaborate revisitings of "Braveheart", "Mary Queen of Scots" and "B.V." (about the drunken Scottish poet James Thomson) – unexpectedly develop the theme of Scottishness, and the title poem even ends with an ambiguous tribute to the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Imlah's verse often works slowly as the reader becomes accustomed to the tone of any given poem, but it is soon clear that the stance in these particular poems is exuberantly post-modern, by turns scathing, funny and very touching, a sardonic celebration of what has been called the "tartanised" elements of Scottish culture and history.

They are interlaced with a number of personal poems, of a kind he had not written before, about parents, sisters and friends, his partner and his children. (He had two daughters, Iona and Mary, with his partner, Maren Meinhardt.) Sadly we shall now never know what their oblique tenderness signalled for the poetry he might have written in the future.

Alan Brownjohn

Michael Ogilvie Imlah, poet: born Aberdeen 26 September 1956; (two daughters); died 12 January 2009.