In My Father’s House (2005)
From a quick-tempered singing grandmother to a performance of The Mikado in an African village, David Kinloch’s exploraton 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 David Livingstone and the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Translations of poems by Paul Celan and others into vivid Scots illuminate the disturbing connections between patriarchy and twentieth-century violence. In contast, moving and humorous ‘dissections’ of adult relationships evoke images of the body both scientific and spiritual.
“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…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
