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‘Readers of Iain Banks’s prose will find in his poems much that is familiar’

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A poet before a novelist, Iain Banks worked on his only collection in the weeks before he died

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.

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