In My Father's House

Kinloch David

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.

About the Author

David Kinloch was born, raised and educated in Glasgow. He is a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Oxford and was for many years a teacher of French studies. He currently teaches creative writing and Scottish literature at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His first collection of poems, entitled "Paris-Forfar", was praised by Edwin Morgan in the Scotsman: "The book is notable for three things: successes in the impossible genre of the prose-poem... a trio of lively flytings... and a series of moving elegies for a gay lover dead from AIDS". Kinloch is the author of four previous collections including "Un Tour d'Ecosse" (2001) and "In My Father's House" (2005), both published by Carcanet, and of many critical works in the fields of French, Translation and Scottish studies. In 2004 he was a winner of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award and in 2006 held a Scottish Writers' Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council. He was a founder editor of the poetry magazine "Verse" and has been instrumental in setting up the first Scottish Writers' Centre.

Reviews

"A sparkling collection: full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father 'and then/I let him go,/but this moment / which is far the hardest pain/remains'. But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; tightly drawn translations of Celan into Scots; and a most impressive long poem, 'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked Middle East of the seventeenth century" – Edwin Morgan

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