The Lost Leader is Mick Imlah’s first collection in 20 years, following Birthmarks in 1988, and it is well worth the wait. It takes in everyone from Saint Columba to John Knox, with appearances from William Wallace, medieval alchemist Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and rugby hero Gordon Brown. But this is no dewy-eyed tribute to national glories past.
Like Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’, which lamented the political conservatism of the aging Wordsworth, Imlah’s verse is in no mood for po-faced reverence. Wallace, for example, is drawn and quartered in four lines:
This done, the moon went overhead;
The bell of Mary Magdalen
Struck one; and smartly off he sped
In several directions.
The fleshy heart of Robert the Bruce, taken on the Crusades as a holy relic, delivers this heroic couplet on the battlefield: ‘Get tae hell, ya Saracen git! / Mohammit gangs tae bed wi’ a dummy tit!’ One thing Imlah’s leaders have not lost is their sense of humour.
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