Mick Imlah - Mark Ford

Mick Imlah, who has died aged 52, was one of the most brilliant poets of his generation. His work, collected in the two volumes Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008), reveals a poetic sensibility that was utterly original; his poems are by turns lyrical, sardonic, hilarious and unsettling. Like all great poetry, his work induces in the reader, to borrow one of his own lines, "a warm, delicious tingle and flush of the veins".

He was born Michael Ogilvie Imlah, with a twin sister, Fiona, in Aberdeen. His first 10 years were spent in Milngavie, near Glasgow. In 1966 the Imlah family moved south, to Beckenham, Kent. Mick attended Dulwich College, and in 1976 was awarded a "demyship" scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met, as his tutor, the poet who would be the most significant influence on his own development, John Fuller. In due course they would collaborate on a wonderful series of six-line poems on the counties of England, published in Poetry Review in 1986.

On my decline, a millipede

Helped me to keep count;

For every time I slipped a foot

Farther down the mountain

She'd leave a tiny, cast-off limb

Of crimson on my cheek

As if to say -

You're hurting us both, Mick...