Search results for ""Author Mick Imlah""

Mick Imlah's second and long-awaited collection The Lost Leader was published to acclaim in 2008, shortly before his early death in January 2009. The present retrospect connects the work of three decades, drawing upon Imlah's earlier full-length collection, Birthmarks (1988), but also including uncollected poems and previously unpublished work. The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize and revealed a poet of dazzling virtuosity, eloquence and subtlety - breaking through, as Imlah said of Edwin Muir (whose poems he selected in his last year) 'to a field of unforced imaginative fluency and an unexpected common cause'. Edited by Mark Ford and with an essay by Alan Hollinghurst, the Selected Poems brings together the best work of a poet who can now be seen, with increasing clarity, as a 'lost leader' of Scottish poetry in our time.

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'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 new collection do take the most over-worn of Scottish myths as their apparent starting points, spanning the Wallace and the Bruce; the Bonnie Prince (pivotal Lost Leader of the title), Robert Burns and Walter Scott; whisky, Clydeside and football. Imlah's approach to this folklore is brilliantly fresh, a modern, sardonic but strongly-felt rendering of Scotland: from AD 500, by way of a guided tour of Iona, to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot. And, as the chronicle reaches the twentieth century, the poems turn to friends and family - childhood reminiscences, elegies and celebrations - influenced still by sporting and military fantasy, the charm of history and the power of anachronism.

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Born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887, Edwin Muir settled in various parts of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century - from Glasgow, to Austria and Czechoslovakia throughout to 1920s, 1930s and again after the war. Muir's poetry bears oblique witness to the most traumatic years and events of this century, and is haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface 'story' of mere events, as he came to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the European maelstrom. As Seamus Heaney has written: 'Muir's poetic strength revealed itself in being able to co-ordinate the nightmare of history with that place in himself where he had trembled with anticipation . . . His simultaneous at-homeness and abroadness is exemplary.'

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Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her first husband - a reprobate from Louisiana - appears at the school gates, a dreadful secret is revealed and the county is scandalized. Ostracised by the community, the pair seem trapped in a hopeless situation - until the combative but warm-hearted headmaster of the school, Dr Wortle, offers his support, and Mr Peacocke embarks upon a journey to America that he hopes will lay to rest the accusations once and for all. A perceptive exploration of Victorian morality, Dr Wortle's School (1881) also contains echoes of Trollope's own life, and his personal affection for the vivacious Bostonian Kate Field.

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children of a clergyman. After a childhood marked by trauma, he went up to Cambridge in 1828, where he met Arthur Hallam, whose premature death had a lasting influence on Tennyson's life and writing. His two volumes of Poems (1842) established him as the leading poet of his generation, and of the Victorian period. He was created Poet Laureate in 1850 and in 1883 accepted a peerage.

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