Mick Imlah was one of the outstanding poets of his generation. Using his postmodernist Oxford background as a springboard, he vigorously reinvented himself as an ironical Scottish writer of unique humour and insight.

Michael Ogilvie Imlah was born (with his twin Fiona) in Aberdeen in 1956, and brought up in Milngavie, near Glasgow. When he was 10 the family moved south to Beckenham in Kent, and he was sent to Dulwich College. From there in 1976 he obtained a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a first in English in 1979. As well as being secretary of the John Florio Society, for which he produced the most remarkably anecdotal minutes in its history, he played in the first college cricket and soccer teams, and was captain of rugby. Imlah was envied by contemporaries for contriving to stay in residence longer than anyone in living memory. He began, but never submitted, a thesis on Arthurian myth in Victorian poetry. Then, in 1984-85 and again in 1986-88, he was appointed a junior lecturer in English.

During this time he also launched his career as a poet, critic and editor. His brilliant Sycamore Press pamphlet The Zoologist’s Bath and other Adventures was published in 1982, attracting immediate public interest (it was described by Peter Porter in The Observer as “Browning in the world of Hammer films”) and in 1983 he was one of the founding editors of the successfully revived Oxford Poetry. With great enthusiasm and sense of fun, he edited the Poetry Review from September 1983 to June 1986 (for the first year with Tracey Warr) and in 1984 secured the E. C. Gregory Award that usually signals the arrival of the “promising” poet still under 30 (Jamie McKendrick and Carol Ann Duffy were among that vintage year).

His first full collection was Birthmarks (Chatto and Windus, 1988). It included the troubled dreams and fantasies of the Sycamore pamphlet, but enlarged its hallmark theme of male uncertainty into a notable investigation of guilt, shame and embarrassment. Misunderstandings of class, culture and gender were embodied in absorbing fictive episodes and confessions (the parasitic Scottish tramp in Goldilocks, the bland self-justifying betrayer of Clio’s, the alarmingly matter-of-fact downplaying of sexual jealousy in Her Version) with a new note of sometimes gnomic playfulness in poems such as Tusking and Silver. Imlah’s vigorous exploitation of verse effects, particularly in his anapaestic narrative line, was relatively unusual at the time, and his attention to formal detail was forceful: in the anarchic social exposure of Cockney, for example, even the rhyming (“Mahler/milieu/Millwall”) enacts the outrageous clash of cultures. It was a notable debut, and Imlah was consequently employed by Chatto as its poetry editor from 1989 to 1993. Thereafter he worked as poetry editor at The Times Literary Supplement.

It was six years before Imlah collected newer work in Penguin Modern Poets 3 (1994). Notable among these were poems that in different ways dealt with the social problems of the habitual drinker. The best of these is Past Caring, a moving and tender poem for his sister. B. V. (second of the Afterlives of the Poets) is a wildly funny if disturbing account of the dipsomaniac Scottish poet James Thomson. It derives (like the episodes from the only partly-collected parody-epic The Drinking Race, which had appeared in Birthmarks) from a typically rumbustious feature which Imlah had created for the Poetry Review back in 1984. The theme was not new (Abortion in The Zoologist’s Bath was as much about hangover as about actual abortion) and Imlah returned to it with a rueful inventiveness in his last collection, The Lost Leader (Faber, 2008) where he identified “the alcoholic gene” in an adopted ancestor, the folk poet John Imlah.

Imlah had been induced to publish an attractive pamphlet of new work in 2006 (Diehard, Clutag Press) but few readers were prepared for the extraordinary range and riches of the 126 pages of The Lost Leader (which won the Forward prize for 2008 and was perhaps the most exciting addition to Faber’s prestigious list since Paul Muldoon). His new subject was the Scotland of history, legend and folk tradition mediated through the experience of a 21st-century sensibility conscious of the factitiousness of romantic attitudinising and of the precariousness of roots. He took it up in a spirit of ironic self-identification and in repudiation of an embargo by Edwin Muir, quoted at the beginning of the book: “No poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs, and the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie.” Imlah decided that he could be historical and encyclopaedic and insinuatingly personal at much the same time. His procedure depended to some extent on the “attraction to lost facts” that he once mentioned in a review of Douglas Galbraith’s novel The Rising Sun, but it also fully exploited his skill with telling descriptions, downbeat endings and a vigorously abrupt narrative line that owed something to his admired Tennyson (whom he had edited for Faber in 2004). The telling morals of Imlah’s ludic fables were never insisted, but they enter deeply into the reader’s consciousness. Oblique many of them perhaps were, but they could be strikingly beautiful.

Imlah was also an unusually perceptive and conscientious critic. There was a distilled clarity of understanding and judgment in his diligent reviews, and he could always be relied on for more permanent critical contributions of quality (for example, to Auden Studies 1, 1990, and to Ian Hamilton’s Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poets, 1996). In 1999 he edited Trollope’s Dr Wortle’s School, and in 2000 The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Robert Crawford).

In the autumn of 2007 he was given a diagnosis of motor neurone disease, a blow that he faced with characteristic practicality and defiance. As perhaps a kind of oblique testament, he flagged Wallace Stevens’s Presence of an External Master of Knowledge as the poem of the week in the TLS in February 2008. In this poem of 1954, first published in the year before Stevens’s own death, the poet presents (like Tennyson before him) the figure of Ulysses as a symbol of the persistent seeker:

The great Omnium descends on me, Like an absolute out of this eloquence.

Imlah was a charismatic but insistently modest man with the loyalties of a team player who could seem wary of fully trusting his remarkably inventive genius, and yet there was evidence of his concise wit in every scrap that came from his pen. Eloquence was indeed his gift, and the great Omnium descended too soon: the loss to literature is grave and deprives poetry of one of its leading practitioners.

He is survived by his partner, Maren Meinhardt, and their two daughters.

Mick Imlah, poet, critic and editor, was born on September 26, 1956. He died on January 12, 2009, aged 52