In Search of Dustie-Fute
Who is Dustie-Fute? A vagrant, a hawker, a poet. A dustyfooted Scottish Orpheus. A stranger, a migrant, a ghost. In his search for Dustie-Fute, David Kinloch begins amid the Parisian floods of 1910: with the waters rising, a lonely giraffe speaks from the abandoned zoo, witness to what seems the end of the world. Other animals chime in, Dustie-Futes all, a hooved and humped chorus of watery sages. Elsewhere, two young college dudes quote Rilke at each other. Cain's wife, the Virgin Mary and that eternal stepdad St Joseph draw on memories they didn't know they had. In a series of feminist monologues, feisty biblical women seek revenge on their husbands and oppressors, before Dustie-Fute's final incarnation as a Cavafy-reading Syrian refugee.
Who is Dustie-Fute? Many are, and many have been. A fellowship of strangers across time: free spirits, survivors. Kinloch's bestiary of forgotten voices spans apocalypse and salvage, elegy and humour. Mythic and erotic, his poems engage ecological disaster, LGBT art and politics, and that great resistance movement, love.
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
