David Kinloch, Un Tour d'Ecosse
(Carcanet, 2001), 96pp., £6.95
David Kinloch’s new collection boasts a great, but inaccurate, jacket quote: “Here is Scotland as it has never been seen before”. In many ways true – a poet as idiosyncratic and exceptional as he was bound to create a distinctively polarised view of Scotland. But shouldn’t it be “Here is what Scotland has not cared to see in recent years”: a poet who wrestles with identity politics as much as form, whose lexicon is at times shamelessly daunting, and who realises that being an almost Metaphysical ‘Wit’ does not imply being a punch-line snigger-monger?
Where does Kinloch fit into the jigsaw of contemporary Scottish poetry? It seems fair to ask the question since the volume itself foregrounds questions of belonging, difference and place. His use of Scots is a case in point. Whilst MacDiarmid may have pined for the day when his poached words tripped of the tongue of every Scot, Kinloch thrives on the bricolage effect of his dictionary-trawling.
How hard ‘greengown’ tries! How hard it tries to become more than a word in a dictionary.
Only copyright constrictions forbid me including the subsequent cadenza around the word; where it is reconstituted, rehabilitated and finally found wanting.
“Ode tae Borborygmusses” is a case in point; a phonetic riot that Morgan would appreciate:
Rift n’pump! Rift n’pump!
Deep curmurin uv yer tummy an yer trollie bags,
Girnin, fidgety flesh,
Voices, unstoppable whispery organs,
Wee yelps, the only patter ’at doesny lee,
An which persists even a bit eftir ye’ve popped yer veritable clogs.
Most of this is intelligible to most readers with a knack for understanding onomatopoeia and a willingness to sing the line. And although many words in the poem are glossed in footnotes, the title is not. There seems almost a Scriblerian sense of humour at play, when ‘pop your clogs’ warrants a footnote, yet the gloriously suggestive “Borborygmusses” can pass without comment and yet still be absolutely appropriate.
The almost somatic resonances of these lines lead to another concern of the book: the body. I remember having an argument with a friend over Morgan’s “One Cigarette”; mainly revolving around whether or not the poem included lipstick on the cigarette (à propos of me saying that Morgan was gay – even in the early nineties some things hadn’t filtered through). There is no lipstick on the cigarette in question (and even if there had been it didn’t disprove the argument): but, the point. Morgan’s love poetry is necessarily evasive about the identity of the other person (written in a time when homosexuality was a serious offence, a law that remained on the statute book in Scotland long after it had been liberalised in England). Kinloch, to his credit, and in changed days, is forthright about the masculinity of the object, both as self and as other. In some cases, this manifests itself as an anarchic playfulness around such stereotypical versions of ‘Scottish masculinity’ as the Australian Wallace-impersonator, Mel Gibson. At other times, it appears in as elegy, celebration, comedy and impressively un-surreal imagery: the glans as the knot at the end of a rope.
“Wall” is the most accomplished of these immediate engagements. The poem creates a cartography of the space between unheld hand, then eroticises that space in a Larkinesque diction of suppression and secrecy.
the silk forest
Of your ear-lobe’s blonde still-baby
Hairs.
(Isn’t the ‘Hairs’ lovely? The individuality of the observation; the refusal just to lapse into the obvious?) But the poem has a sharper political edge than the wistfulness of a latter-day Housman. Anger, frustration and indignation surface, and command the final stanzas.
Linguistically and politically, Kinloch’s book celebrates difference, tinged with the fear that difference, however unique or beautiful, will be shunned and sidelined. The lines are studded with exclamation marks, which seem to typify the qualities of insistence and surprise that the poetry conveys.
Formally, the poems inhabit a pleasing diversity. Even when using the most intricate and recognisable of forms – such as Standard Habbie or the remarkable interlaced cento of “The Barrier” – the structures never seem imposed onto the material, and there is no sense of grammatical acrobatics to accommodate the form. It is, however, in the prose poetry that Kinloch’s radical engagement with questions of form is most obvious and most virtuoso. The ‘oral’ qualities of repetition, ellipsis, phatic utterance are skillfully manoeuvred, highlighting minute but important semantic differences between superficially similar syllables. When so many novels are lauded as being ‘poetic’ – usually a euphemism for overloaded with adjectives – it’s important to see how the poetic qualities of prose can be positively exploited.
Kinloch’s self, and Scotland, and literary predecessors (Lorca, Whitman, O’Hara and Burns rubbing shoulders with graffiti, brand names, argot and jargon) are incorrigibly plural. This book is a gauntlet thrown down to the cotton-wool quatrains of so much verse. Un tour de force.
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