Press
“David Kinloch is surely one of the most innovative poets ever to come out of Scotland … [his] readers must be prepared to take a long voyage through language, imagination, and space. While it isn’t always easy, it’s always worth the trip.”
— Douglas Messerli, Hyperallergic (reprinted by Poetry Foundation)
Greengown: New & Selected Poems
“…Kinloch’s book is a “New and Selected Poems”, which is a rare accolade in poetry. I first read some of these in the last millennium, and so reading them again with older eyes was insightful. He is openly gay, and in a way his work exemplifies a particularly queer style. I mean that in every sense. It is unflinching in talking about gay life and experience, but it is also askance, unsettling, always either swerving or tripping the reader. It is, as well, quair, as in the old Scots for a book. It is a bookish book. If anyone deserves to be considered the heir to Edwin Morgan, I would suggest it be Kinloch…”
— Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
Iggleheim’s Ark
“These poems have superb coherence. They belong together unusually well, so much so that the reading experience for me was outstandingly rich and rewarding, though almost impossible to describe. Where can I start? … Each time I step back into Igglesheim’s Ark, I want to stay there. Yes, you need to take Google with you but the boat’s bigger inside than out. Plenty of room for any number of readers. So far as I can see, it’s unsinkable.”
— Helena Nelson, Sphinx
In Search of Dustie-fute
“Kinloch is the great Pagan of Scottish poetry. Yet sensitive and sensible enough to say with Mary Magdalene “‘Start again’ was his favourite saying./He didn’t bleed./The whiteness is tremendous”.”
— Hayden Murphy, The Herald
“David Kinloch is surely one of the most innovative poets ever to come out of Scotland. At times, he plays with archaic Scottish phrases, while spinning narratives about literary and art figures as various as Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Roussel, as well as translating Paul Celan. All of these threads are amazingly interwoven with discussions of Kinloch’s homosexuality and, as in this book, small feminist-based poems. Kinloch’s readers must be prepared to take a long voyage through language, imagination, and space. While it isn’t always easy, it’s always worth the trip.”
— Douglas Messerli, Hyperallergic (reprinted by Poetry Foundation)
Some Women
“Some Women is a collection written at the highest pitch of erudition, passion and humour.”
— James Sutherland-Smith, PN Review
“As a literary agent and an Eng. Lit. undergraduate, I’ve seen more than my share of poetry, from the sublime to the gorblimey, and let me tell you this: this is how I like my free verse. Pointed, punchy, serious where it needs to be, witty wherever it can be, written by someone who knows that free verse is not just cut-up prose, someone aware of the value, and meaning, and double meaning, and sound, and rhythm of every word. The nameless wife of Cain was all rhythm; ‘Rebecca’ made poetry out of the exotic names of food; Bathsheba and David rolled the letters ‘B’ and ‘D’ round their tongues in an orgy of alliteration; Rahab ‘stonewalled… in a world of falling walls’; Ruth was the first of ‘the endless line of women who will give birth to God’; Martha complained to Jesus, ‘Resurrect this bucket’. ‘Deborah’ focused on the female Judge of pre-monarchic Israel, handing out ‘a thorough stoning’ (is there any other kind?), exhorting the Israelite C-in-C “Arise, Barak, the roots of war are everywhere…” and chiding him for not watering them; the modern reference was very vivid and was not lost on us…”
— Paul Thompson, Mumble Words
Finger of a Frenchman
“… a work that mixes its pleasures with provocation, takes risks to open up new territory and, not without irony, scattering its clues far and wide, offers fine poems and rich sauces, served separately.
At the heart of this collection, too, we have a number of related dilemmas: things contrary, not achieving resolution, tending to pull apart. The lyrical vision, in its perfectly achieved particulars, may drift off into utopia. Attempts to make the individual cohere, to be articulate - to be anchored in the here and now - are undercut or thwarted by the nature of language itself: abstracting, abolishing, or simply representing. All these themes become part of the action of the poems and the other forms employed - not dully, or programmatically, I step in quickly to say, but in ways that keep us alert, on the qui vive: delivered satirically from time to time, and also in lines carefully observed and deeply felt.
The poetry - including the long title sequence - is testing in parts, but all to the good, and the language deployed with true finesse. In many instances we get what we are promised: not spiritual components simplified in verse, not aura; but 'ordinary energies' intensified, made vivid. Within the collection (as collection) overall, you are more likely to encounter a 'sensuous breeze' than a 'dried-up chameleon' - since Kinloch can deliver what he himself anticipates: 'Not still life but life; still'.”
— Alexander Hutchison, PN Review
Drawings by WN Herbert
In My Father’s House
“David Kinloch's In My Father's House has, indeed, many mansions. It is a 'concept album' collection, that includes bitter-sweet elegies and reminiscences of Kinloch's own father, alongside more problematic images of patriarchs; most notably in a sequence of Holocaust-survivor Paul Celan's poems translated into a vigorous and uncouthy Scots. There are times when a 'single-issue' gathering of work can become rather too problematic: Kinloch avoids any potential repetitiveness through the vast, and experimental, range of forms. In addition to the Scots language translations, there are variations on Palestinian poems, long, dramatic monologues (including the exceptional 'Baines His Dissection') and prose-poems, a notoriuosly difficult mode that Kinloch inhabits breezily.”
— S. B. Kelly, The Scotsman
Un Tour d’Ecosse
“His capacity for building larger structures out of individual poems (one of the most memorable aspects of Paris-Forfar) is undiminished: the unspoken barrier of 'Wall' is placed next to a prose-poem on 'The Thresholds of a Scottish Parliament '(“Within the door-stane smeddum of the thresholds of a Scottish Parliament the delicate hyphens pivot, rocking its peoples inwards, outwards to the translated melodies of Carmichael’s blessing”), leading on to a heartbreaking evocation of human solitude in 'The Barrier', echoed by the comic, loving entanglements of the wakeful and sleeping partners in 'Bed'. Such ramifications extend outward from the most straightforward-seeming of these poems, making this a collection whose coherence and pleasurable complexity increase with every reading.”
— Peter Manson, Object Permanence
“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?
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.”
— S. B. Kelly, Poetrymagazines.org