Poem of the month - December 2008

London Scottish (1914) April, the last full fixture of the spring: ‘Feet, Scottish, feet’ – they rucked the fear of God Into Blackheath. Their club was everything: And of the four sides playing that afternoon, The stars, but also those from the back pitches, All sixty volunteered for the touring squad, And swapped their Richmond turf for Belgian ditches. October: mad for a fight, they broke too soon On the Ypres Salient, rushing the ridge between ‘Witshit’ and Messines.         Three-quarters died. Of that ill-balanced and fatigued fifteen The ass selectors favoured to survive, Just one, Brodie the prop, resumed his post. The others sometimes drank to ‘The Forty-Five’: Neither a humorous nor an idle toast. Mick Imlah The Lost Leader (Faber & Faber, 2008) Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

About the Poet   Mick Imlah was born in 1956 and brought up near Glasgow and in Kent. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he subsequently taught as a Junior Fellow. He was editor of Poetry Review from 1983-6, and has worked at the Times Literary Supplement since 1992. His poems have appeared in The Zoologist’s Bath (1982), Birthmarks (1988), Penguin New Poets 3 (1994) and Diehard (2006). He has edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Robert Crawford, 2000) and made selections for Faber of the poems of Tennyson and Edwin Muir. He lives in North London with his partner and two daughters.