David Kinloch Author Critic Scholar Creativing Writing Scottish Literature

Poetry Collections

Dustie-Fute (Vennel Press, 1992)

Paris-Forfar (Polygon, 1994). Available to purchase online from Amazon

Un Tour d'Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001) book cover. Poetry Collection by David Kinloch Un Tour d'Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001). Available to purchase online from Carcanet.

Un Tour d'Ecosse provides a vision of Scotland from the handlebars of the ecologically friendly machine the French call 'la petite reine'. Here are poems of loss and desire, poems in Scots and English and poetry in English about Scots. There is an ode addressed to a poet by a cockroach, and a hippopotamus migrates from a New York Hotel to the Venetian lagoon. Burns, Frank O'Hara, Apollinaire and Mel Gibson have parts to play and there are elegies for the film-maker Derek Jarman and the French writer Herve Guibert. An extended sequence features a fantasy bicycle race around Scotland modelled on the famous Tour de France with Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca in the yellow jersey. From Sauchiehall Street to Carradale, Dunkeld to the Orkneys, here is Scotland as it has never been seen before.

In My Fathers House book cover. Poetry collection by David Kinloch In My Father's House (Carcanet, 2005). Available to purchase online from Carcanet.

From a quick-tempered singing grandmother to a performance of The Mikado in an African village: David Kinloch's exploration of his relationship with his father is both unexpected and affectionate. An extended sequence of poems moves from personal memory to reflections on the values embodied in such cultural father-figures as the explorer David Livingstone and the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Translations of poems by Paul Celan and others into vivid Scots weave through the sequence, illuminating the disturbing connections between patriarchy and twentieth-century violence. In contrast, moving and humorous 'dissections' of adult relationships evoke images of the body both scientific and spiritual, culminating in a long narrative poem that celebrates the loving relationship between two seventeenth-century diplomats and doctors, against the background of the bustling city of Constantinople.

Finger of a Frenchman book cover. Poetry by David Kinloch Finger of a Frenchman (Carcanet, 2011). Available to purchase online from Carcanet.

Finger of a Frenchman explores looking, and writing about looking: looking at surfaces and beyond them, at what is depicted and what is hidden in shadow, at how a transient chemistry of light may be fixed in colour and words.

Kinloch’s poems are portraits of artists and reflections on art through five centuries of the artistic bond between Scotland and France. John Acheson, Master of the Scottish Mint, takes Mary, Queen of Scots’ portrait for the Scottish coinage, Esther Inglis paints the first self-portrait by a Scottish artist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ticks off his portrait painter, Allan Ramsay, and Eugene Delacroix offers David Wilkie a brace of partridge for tea in Kensington. The Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and Charles Rennie Mackintosh bring the gallery into the twentieth century, where Kinloch considers the hybrid art of figures such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Watt and Douglas Gordon in analytical prose-poems.

In the book’s second part, a mini-epic of a seventeenth-century priest’s Grand Tour offers a reflection on the nature of Collection itself, whether of paintings or poems, the composing of fragments into a whole.

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