In My Father's House

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.

David Kinloch is from Glasgow where he grew up and was educated. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most published by Carcanet Press, including In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017) which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize and his most recent, Greengown: New and Selected Poems (2022). In 2022 he received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors for his work to date. He has degrees in French and English from the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford and spent much of his working life as a teacher of French at University level. In 2003, he changed course to focus on the teaching of creative writing and after retiring in 2019 is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of Strathclyde. In addition to his collections of poetry, David is the author of a monograph on the French writer, Joseph Joubert, a number of edited books and many papers on a variety of French and Scottish writers including Mallarmé, Edwin Morgan and Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1983 he co-founded the literary journal, Verse, with Robert Crawford and Henry Hart and co-edited it with them and with Richard Price for the next ten years. A recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial award and of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship for his poetry, David set up a cultural exchange between Scotland and Switzerland which ran for much of the ‘noughties’ and helped to found the Scottish Writers’ Centre in 2008. In the same year he launched the inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, now the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. This is administered by The Edwin Morgan Trust which David helped to found and which he chaired from 2019-2022.