In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017)
Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award // Who is Dustie-Fute? A vagrant, a hawker, a poet. A dusty-footed 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.
“Kinloch’s new collection responds to — and looks back on — endangered critters, artists’ images, biblical figures, personal histories, and sees them walking away, back to the underworld where all losses dwell. The final looks on the faces are what Kinloch so brilliantly and movingly compels us to see.”
— Jee Leong Koh
“Kinloch exposes the fault lines in our culture, both ancient and modern. In poems that offer a female perspective on Biblical patriarchy or reveal the still marginal existence of a gay man in contemporary society, he interprets our flawed civilisation in witty, eloquent and compassionate language.”
— James Sutherland-Smith
