David Kinloch

David Kinloch is one of the notable Scottish poets of his generation. Edwin Morgan admired his 'sparkling poems full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness'; and Douglas Messerli declared, '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.' This is his fifth Carcanet collection. It includes a distillation of his earlier work, and new poems that delight and challenge. Morgan praised his success in the 'impossible genre', the prose poem, his elegies, his flytings. He has been an activist as well as a poet, helping to set up The Edwin Morgan Trust and the first Scottish Writers' Centre.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. 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.

Aiblins is a selection of new Scottish political poetry. The poems in this collection reflect the tumultuous, rapidly evolving nature of contemporary Scottish politics. They also stand as a testament to the deep engagements poets are making with the political landscape today, not only by reflecting on current events through their work but also by issuing provocations which reframe and challenge conventional assumptions.

From a quick-tempered singing grandmother to a performance of The Mikado in an African village: David Kinloch's exploration 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 the explorer David Livingstone and the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Translations of poems by Paul Celan and others into vivid Scots weave through the sequence, illuminating the disturbing connections between patriarchy and twentieth-century violence. In contrast, moving and humorous 'dissections' of adult relationships evoke images of the body both scientific and spiritual, culminating in a long narrative poem that celebrates the loving relationship between two seventeenth-century diplomats and doctors, against the background of the bustling city of Constantinople.