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“... With a few soft words Her Majesty Christened the liner built as ‘504’: ‘I name this ship – Myself. God bless . . .’ The towering masterpiece of the Depression, She rose from the not-so-bonny Bank of Clyde (Bombed to a pit for its pains in ’41). Meanwhile, John Masefield wrote a handsome poem (‘Shredding a trackway like a mile of snow ...”

“... How heightened the taste! – of champagne at the piano; of little side-kisses to tickle the fancy At the party to mark our sarcastic account of the overblown Mass of the Masses by Finzi (An aristocrat who betrayed what he stood for and set up in Bow with his matchgirl fiancée); Moreover, the skit I had chosen to grace the occasion (‘My Way – in the Setting for Tuba by Mahler’) Had even the Previns in generous stitches (it seemed an acceptable social milieu If only because it was something like six million light years away from the planet of Millwall) When the buffet arrived; and as we applauded the crudités carved into miniature flats and sharps There crept into mind for a desperate moment the ghost of me mum shuffling back from the shops With a Saturday treat – ‘Look! We got sausages, beans, an’ chips!’ So I mentally told her to stuff it, and turned, with a shivering reflex of anger To harangue a superior brace of brunettes for their preference of Verdi to Wagner; But again she appeared at the door, with the salt and the sacred vinegar And I was reclaimed ...”

“... oot, Twa young men. Daith taks the lot, They sey, But, ach, Thae sangs He’s nivver Gonnae get. Mick Imlah Than Orpheus befor Pluto sat doune, And in his handis quhyte his harp can ta …            Henryson, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ The day you died I stared up at the grey Dome of St Paul’s, then caught the sleeper ...”

“... of the best-known contemporary British poets. Maybe the state should buy some copies of this book. Mick Imlah’s poems ask the question ‘Whey you from?’ in a lively variety of ways. Birthmarks speak of origins you can’t rub off. Under the cosmetic voice-surgery of social climbing lies the Ur-accent of home. In ‘Cockney’ an aspiring ...”

“... anthology (published in 1970) again there was no Gaelic. Recently, Penguin have commissioned Mick Imlah to edit a new Scottish anthology. Will he allow Sorley MacLean’s voice to accompany MacDiarmid’s? To the best of my knowledge, nobody has been asked to do a new Oxford anthology, though the youngest poet in their extant volume, Iain Crichton ...”

“... think of the following poem, another recent one. This is ‘At the Kerb’, written in memory of Mick Imlah, who died in 2009 at the age of 52 – he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease a year earlier. The manner of the poem is statelier than that of the previous example, striking a mildly archaic note borrowed from ‘Ode on a Grecian ...”

“... since 1945 (co-edited with Simon Armitage) and The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (co-edited with Mick Imlah) – included Welsh. The early section of the Scottish Verse anthology also pulled in medieval Latin, Old Norse, Old English and Old French. American academic anthologists acted similarly. Since 1962, the Norton Anthology of English ...”

“... though among more modern poets the trail is more elusive it has not quite disappeared. The late Mick Imlah edited a very good selection of Tennyson for Faber, and his last book of verse, The Lost Leader, contains ‘In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson’. The speaker of the poem and his companion have gone to visit one of Tennyson’s houses in a spirit ...”

“... in 1965, six years after Muir’s death, or, better still, in the 2008 Selected edited by Mick Imlah, who concentrates on Muir’s finest late poems. First published in the Listener in 1955, ‘The Horses’ was described by Eliot as ‘that great, that terrifying poem of the “atomic age”’. From a 21st-century viewpoint, it seems more like ...”