David Kinloch: Paris Forfar
David Kinloch, Paris-Forfar. Polygon, 22 George Square, Edinburgh. 86pp A5. ISBN 0 7486 6183 2. 1994.
Kinloch opens his first full-length collection with a miscellany of short poems, mostly verse-format and in English: there's some very moving work here, especially in the poems on his late father and grandfather, but there's also an admixture of the more occasional pieces - The Tear in Pat Kane's Voice, 'The Usual Suspects' (for Jackie Kay), an Ode to Hart Crane - that I never felt were Kinloch's strong point (but see below). His poem To Glyn Maxwell asserts that "all poets names are or aspire to be" verbs (fair enough, but some poets' names are already the French verb to fart, and didn't ask to be). The first translation from Eugenio de Andrade's Portuguese into a marvellously nonchalant Scots (it ends "na, it's jist a blink") begins to show a richer Kinloch, and with Roobrub ("rhubarb", & I'm not reading this section in order) something remarkable happens: a dense Scots verse-poem of childhood and awakening sexuality is glossed by an (un-)english prose of such delicacy that it's impossible, finally, to discard either text: "shell-gowd pap-o-the-hass"? "gold leaf uvula"? -- you choose.
The book's real occasion is the 3-section poem-sequence Dustie-Fute, a long elegy for a gay man who died of AIDS. Kinloch's insistence on the wovenness of language carries over into a concern for the body as a garment, seamless maybe, but permeable: "No need for bandages on hands / Where eczema leaves tiny pits / For love's curious virus" (The Clinic). Dustie-Fute himself, a found Scots word for acrobat, encourages a wholesale identification of language with the rest of the world: "Listen to Lalibela, Makalle, Debre Damo, Assab, names which could be people, months, implements in their places" (p.33) & allows for its consequent sexualization, as when Dustie-Fute, as the Scottish Orpheus, floats in "To tell .. of the sex of words / Which looped around his ears." Some of the precarious joyousness of this section (though little of its good humour) is dropped for part 2, Heckiebirnie ("three miles beyond hell") -- the collection's title poem collides the narrator's attempt at coming out to his mother with an account of Scott and Amundsen's race to the South pole in a way which needs to be read to be believed. Hohenzenggestech (a joust of peace) brings chivalric codes to bear on an age of virtual sex, while in Huzziebaw (or hush-a-baa, "a lullaby"), the word itself becomes a VR visor: "Clips attached to the H and W enable you to fasten it around your head as with all middle-alphabet words. Select your preferred definition by pressing firmly on the hyphens" -- your chosen assibilation-level will hush (or huzzh) peace over a scene of romantic memory, or the pain of an AIDS hospice. The harrowing Warmer Bruder (a slang term, "hot brothers", for homosexuals in the death camps of Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg) employs an almost balladic lyricism of repetition and refrain to link the tragedies of past and present. Part 3, Dr. David Kinalochus in le Pensionnat d'Humming-Bird Garden appropriates the persona of the (of course) unrelated 16th/17thc Scottish obstetrician (who narrowly escaped the Inquisition thanks to his iatric skills) to deliver an indescribable monologue in Older Scots, where "aa queerosity [is] a sign of blude-born viruses that sauchtly colonise syne pox us tae oblivion … an toxoplasma gondii gilravage aa [the] body's humours." This gives way to a gentle alternation between a Scots herbal and the medi-jargon of HIV, "genes with code names such as TAT, REV, VIF, NEF", leading to Needlepoint and Penelope's numbed meditations on the dissolution of the body's fabric. The untitled prose poem, 'Speech fails..' paradoxically shows Language, words of all tongues and registers, returning to Kinloch-Kinalochus as, if not certain good, then at least real presence. Paris-Forfar has many of the characteristics of an ideal dictionary -- every page throws up an echo, a cross-reference, sending the reader back through the book on a non-linear path where everything's enriched by repeated encounter. After Warmer Bruder, The Tear in Pat Kane's Voice (with "Adorno at his plain table, / Rubbing out the barbaric lyrics / Of post-Auschwitz poets") can't read the same way again, and even poor Hart Crane's plummet has its echo in Cumma: 'Da sea en got / No back door boy.' This is one of the most structured books I've ever read, and always playfully, never labouredly so. It's also the most important first collection to have appeared in Scotland in years.
This review first appeared in issue 4 of Object Permanence magazine. A review of David Kinloch's book Un Tour d'Ecosse can be read at the Poetry Review website.
Return to Miscellaneous writing.
Return to 