Un Tour d'EcosseDavid Kinloch, Un Tour d’Ecosse. Manchester, Carcanet Press 2001. 96pp A5, £6.95. ISBN 1 85754 516 8. David Kinloch’s previous collection, Paris-Forfar (Polygon 1994), was one of the defining works of recent Scottish poetry (it’s certainly my favourite Scottish book of the 1990s). At a time when my own interests centred rather exclusively on the contemporary British and North American avant gardes, Kinloch’s work came as a bolt from the blue. Marrying a deep and eclectic awareness of modern European poetry to an affinity for synthetic language which rewrote MacDiarmid as an antiquarian-voluptuary, Kinloch emerged (in that book’s amazing centrepiece Dustie-Fute, a long elegy for a gay man who died of AIDS) writing poetry as extraordinary as any Scot has since the death of W.S. Graham. If I am less amazed by the book under review, that’s partly because Un Tour d’Ecosse privileges the more occasional side of Kinloch’s writing (beautiful as that can be) over the layered slipperiness of his most language-centred — and to me, most original — work. Saying this should emphasise that my response is that of just one, perhaps unrepresentative, reader, bringing his own agenda to a book which, by any sane standard, includes much excellent writing. Some of the most powerful poetry in Paris-Forfar had to do with the awakening of a gay sexuality, and with coming out. The poetry of Un Tour d’Ecosse, by contrast, is very much out there to begin with: the gym-shy schoolboy of Section 28 doesn’t need anyone to ‘promote’ homosexuality to him, he already knows he’s gay. Autobiographical poems about home-making and idyllic holidays (and the mind-altering Conversion, where memories of the poet’s conversion to Catholicism come back to him during anonymous sex) set a predominantly optimistic tone, only to have this undercut by the remarkable, angry Wall: Look at the wall, the sweet and lovely Its tinyness glimpsed from the distances The poem’s oddly multivalent ending, Smash wall! can be read variously as an exhortation to break down the walls of public decorum, as a gay-basher’s revulsion, and as a jag of internalised homophobia. It’s one of Kinloch’s finest achievements. Better still, though, is the long prose piece Des Lits de Guibert (Of Guibert’s Beds), imagining a visit to the Hebridean island of Lewis by Kinloch and the French novelist Hervé Guibert. The skill with which Kinloch differentiates the voice of the grumpy, dying novelist from that of his wide-eyed guide is remarkable for a writer who has (to my knowledge) published no fiction, but it’s the prose-poetry that remains inimitable: Rossignol! Rossignol! Each cry bursts a T-cell. Count! Count! Each note is a footstep in my blood, each enemy that comes has a different mask and name. I count the multitudinous names of beds: lectuli, triclinium, lectisterniacor, lectica sheepishly somersault beneath my lids. Which one will I die in? Towards dawn, I am the queen-pin in a sickly ‘lever de la reine’ assisted with my regalia by vying buddies. Rossignol! The title sequence is, sadly, I think, the weakest part of the book. Written as a poetic dialogue between Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca, who are engaged in an imaginary cycling-tour of Scotland, it stands or falls on whether or not the reader finds this kind of thing funny or moving: Great gorgeous creature of gamboge and black! I’ve always found Kinloch’s humour to be most effective when it’s at its angriest, as in the quietly devastating Three Wee Frees (from Paris-Forfar), a response to bigoted journalism. Un Tour d’Ecosse, though it makes an eloquent plea for tolerance in post-devolution Scotland, is simply too good-natured a rigmarole to have much bite. Maybe the sequence just has too many echoes for me of the American poet Jack Spicer’s much more successful act of ventriloquism in his After Lorca (1957). The book contains several translations and adaptations of French poetry (Kinloch is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Strathclyde), from the unforgettable Ode tae Borborygmusses (eftir Valery Larbaud): Rift n’ pump! Rift n’ pump! to this, from The Year of the Dragon, by Emmanuel Moses: You’re not so wild about my — lines to disarm any critic, and all the more discombobulating for their appearance in a translation... Kinloch sometimes seems a little afraid of his plain style, twisting it into over-easy poeticisms (“I wince, you smile and we / Hopscotch on the dappled / Paving of our easy-ozy inscapes”), and I really wish he would stop using nouns as verbs, but his capacity for building larger structures out of individual poems (one of the most memorable aspects of Paris-Forfar) is undiminished: the unspoken barrier of Wall is placed next to a prose-poem on The Thresholds of a Scottish Parliament (“Within the door-stane smeddum of the thresholds of a Scottish Parliament the delicate hyphens pivot, rocking its peoples inwards, outwards to the translated melodies of Carmichael’s blessing”), leading on to a heartbreaking evocation of human solitude in The Barrier, echoed by the comic, loving entanglements of the wakeful and sleeping partners in Bed. Such ramifications extend outward from the most straightforward-seeming of these poems, making this a collection whose coherence and pleasurable complexity increase with every reading. It’s still not my favourite of Kinloch’s books, but it’s grown on me by stages and I’d recommend it to anyone. This review appeared in volume 93, issue 1 of Poetry Review. Return to Miscellaneous writing. Return to |
