In a pub conversation in the autumn of 2012, long before he had any warning of his illness, Iain Banks told me that he wanted to see his poems published together with mine. I told him that his poems stood very well on their own. He was having none of it. Phrases like “covering fire” and “human shield” came up. I demurred; he insisted. In the end I agreed, but didn’t take the project terribly seriously. Shortly afterwards, and rather to my surprise, he sent me an email attachment of his collection. I looked it over and made casual efforts to pull together some of my own poems. It seemed we had plenty of time.

And then, of course, we found that we didn’t have plenty of time. Alas, we had even less time than we thought. Iain laboured on selecting and revising his poems in what turned out to be his last weeks. He mentioned the project and his insistence on including my poems in his final newspaper interview, with Stuart Kelly for this paper. One of the last things he said to me was that he was sorry he hadn’t had the time or energy to read all the messages of sympathy and goodwill posted to his website, or the time and energy to do more with the poems. I told him he really should not be worrying about that. Even then we didn’t know how late it was.

Iain Banks the literary novelist and Iain M Banks the science-fiction writer are well known. Iain Banks the poet is new to readers outside his immediate circle, but clues to his existence have long been hidden in plain sight. His first published work, in New Writing Scotland 1983, was a poem, “041” . His science-fiction novel Use of Weapons has two poems (“Slight Mechanical Destruction” and “Zakalwe’s Song”) to bookend the text. Lines from a strange, harsh epic are embedded in The Crow Road. Lyrics from the fictitious band Frozen Gold ring through the pages of Espedair Street.



He started writing poems in high school, continued through university and his early and diverse day jobs, and stopped in 1981. Sometime in the early 80s he made a selection, transcribed them by hand with an index of first lines, and called the collection “poems where the heart is”. I don’t think that title shows any inclination to sentimentality. It shows Iain’s weakness for awful puns. He circulated photocopies to a few friends. Later he typed out the entire collection on his computer, and printed them off for anyone who was interested.

A few years ago, in an interview at a science-fiction convention, I asked Iain about his poetry. He claimed he’d started writing at school and continued with it in university because he’d vaguely assumed it was something you were supposed to do if you were a student of English literature. Nevertheless, he took it seriously. Asked why he stopped, he said that prose could be written just by putting your mind to it, but that poetry required inspiration.

One early inspiration may have been the idiosyncratic teaching methods of our high-school English teacher, Joan Woods. She’d play a Simon and Garfunkel album and set her pupils to analyse the lyrics. She’d hand out copies of the poems then being declaimed in pubs by the Edinburgh poetry scene’s young guns, some of whom – Ron Butlin, Brian McCabe – Iain was later to meet, befriend and drink with (probably in those same pubs) as old hands. Their experimental, vernacular early works reinforced the impression Iain and I assimilated from school and university in the early 70s: that poetry had evolved away from contrived artificialities of rhythm and diction to free verse, and that the high points were TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and the rugged, ragged lines of Hugh MacDiarmid. But lyrics too remained an influence and inspiration: Iain was endlessly and avowedly awed by the invention and verbal wit of Clive James’s songwriting with Pete Atkins.

The first poem of Iain’s that I remember from high school was boldly titled “Memoirs” and written in the voice of a retired soldier – who may prefigure Zakalwe, the guilt-haunted hero of Use of Weapons. The teenage Iain of course had no personal experience of violence, let alone war, but his father and many of his older relatives were veterans, and he was already an avid reader of history and much else.

I too started writing poems in high school, continued at university and have written them off and on ever since. From the start Iain was usually their first (and often only) reader. Now and then I inflicted them on other friends, one of whom edited the Leeds University English departments’s magazine, Poetry and Audience, which published my poem “Faith as a Grain of Poppy Seed” – a more prestigious debut than I appreciated at the time. Others have appeared in connection with various science-fiction events, and a handful were selected for the recent well-received anthology Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UK, edited by Russell Jones (Penned in the Margins, 2011). While my poems differ in origin and focus from Iain’s, they developed in a shared mental workspace of assumptions. In editing this new collection, I’ve noticed the occasional glint of mutual influence and dialogue between them.

I read most of Iain’s poems soon after they were written. We weren’t each other’s most critical readers. Nor, to the best of my recollection, did we explore poetry to any great depth beyond our student reading. The Penguin anthology The New Poetry and the successive slim volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets were our touchstones of taste and technique, for better or worse. We relished the unabashed science-fictionality of Edwin Morgan, and the likewise unabashed Glaswegian phonetic demotic of Tom Leonard. We of course read and appreciated work by friends who were published poets, such as Andrew Greig – who introduced us to the Edinburgh poets, as well as to Morgan, much to our delight. Eliot still loomed large in our pantheon, as the titles of Iain’s novels Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward suggest. It took the joyous irreverence of Wendy Cope’s “Waste Land Limericks” – Iain yelped with laughter when I recited them to him – to give me the brass neck to attempt “A Fertile Sea”, my own impertinent response to Eliot’s masterwork. The poem grew from and alludes to a long evening of increasingly drunk conversation between me, Iain and a publishing colleague, with cigarette smoke thickening the air and blearing the one eye each of us kept on the television news updates, the night Chernobyl burned.

Iain’s poems vary greatly in length and theme, ranging from discursive meditations on landscape and relationships through highly crafted love poems and take-no-prisoners polemics to witty squibs. Few are SF poetry as such. Even “Zakalwe’s Song” could be set in the 20th century, and “Slight Mechanical Destruction” could with trivial changes be set in the not-too-distant future.

Readers of Iain’s prose will find in the poems many aspects of his writing with which they’re already familiar: a humane and materialist sensibility, an unflinching stare at the damage people can do to each other, a warm appreciation of the joy they can give to each other, a revelling in language, a geologically informed gaze on land and sea, and a continued meditation on what it means to be embodied minds with a fleeting existence between abysses of deep time. Poetry was a small part of his work, but it illuminates a large aspect of his art.

• Poems by Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod is published by Little, Brown at £12.99.