David Kinloch | In Search of Dustie-Fute / 2017

journeys into the underworld of thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Kinloch In Search of Dustie-Fute (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2017)

 

David Kinloch is surely one of the most innovative poets ever to come out of Scotland. In his books he plays, at times, with archaic Scottish phrases, while spinning narratives from literary figures as various as Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Roussel, as well as translating Paul Celan—all of which are even more amazingly interwoven with discussions of his homosexuality and, as in this book, small feminist-based poems. In reading a book of poems by Kinloch one must be ready to take a long voyage through language, imagination, and space. If it isn’t always easy-going it is always worth the trip.

 

      In his newest book the poem goes on the search for Dustie-Fute, a Scots figure who is a merchant, a troubadour, a juggler, and in Kinloch’s book “a figure of Orpheus,” totally appropriate in this case since in a central poem/essay of this book, “Felix, June 5, 1994,” the poet explores the photographs of Canadian-born artist A. A. Bronson’s quilt-like works dedicated to men who have died of AIDS, this poem centered on Bronson’s lover Felix Partz:

 

                              You thread a sea with your eye;

                              each time the needle enters your flank

                              the pain composes you;

 

                              trees that hung your voice

                              among those patterns

                              wrap your quilt in foliage;

 

                              a dog barks through the branches;

                              a girl’s arm passes like an oar

                              across the unlit patches;

 

                              now your song kneels

                              at the river’s edge

                              and will not flow;

 

                              your passport head is pinned in silk.

       It’s not easy to parse this poem; it is after all a kind of gut response to an awful death, and perhaps it’s simply better to read Kinloch’s own narrative about the photo and Bronson’s art. But it clearly represents the poet’s intense insight into the worlds he represents and creates. Given the almost pin-size head of the original, set against various patterns and colors of the rest of the work, the last line of this poem is particularly painful. In death, Felix’s head has definitely become almost insignificant to the song the work sings about the underworld—the mad swirl of colors and patterns—to which he has given up his being.

     

     One of the work’s most brilliant poems takes the viewpoint of Joseph:

 

                                      Not mine. The call wasn’t for me. The phone

                                      rang in the next room and it was the Angel.

 

This multi-sectioned poem is a beautiful portrait of a man who loves but yet is kept apart from object of that love:

 

                                                              The boy

 

                                                   I teach him. He is grateful.

                                                   Holds love back for a future

                                                   as big as this nail

                                                   I beat into the bench

                                                   where it lies almost

                                                   flush with the wood.

 

        This lovely piece suggests the gentleness of the patient carpenter, while at the same time hinting at his sensuous desire for his beautiful son through the phallic images of the nail which he beats into the wood and the coming together of that nail with the bench on which, we suspect, the young Jesus lies. This Joseph, although described as a saint, is not always so saintly. In “St. Joseph’s Dream,” for example, he expresses what might almost be envy for his wife’s ability “to shake / hands with the Angel.” And some of his dreams are violent, particularly when his internal voices speak in his dreams, compelling him to Flee into Egypt. Kinloch’s Joseph is a man you might never have imagined in biblical literature or commentary, a sensual man attempting to make sense of his wife’s mysterious birth and his “perfect son.”

       Some of strongest poems in this moving book, however, come near its end, where the poet’s Orpheus must now come to terms with his Eurydice. In the long two poems of “Some Women,” Kinloch gives us entirely new perspectives of Lilith, Cain’s wife, Adah and Zillah, Sarah, Rebekah, Deborah, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, the daughters of Job, King David’s concubines, Hannah, Martha, Mary Magdalene, and others. If this sounds a bit like a religious-based text, think again. These women are quirky and strong, ur-feminists who recognize their world and their positions in it are untenable and difficult to negotiate. Mary Magdalene, for example, seems married to a Christ who demands she “Look within,” but because of the society in which she exists cannot find any                               

 

                                       What I remember is I was weeping,

                                       and I turned to the gardener (who looked like

                                       my husband) and I screamed, ‘The body has gone!’

                                       He told me to look inside. ‘Look within.’

 

                                       Two words. So I think he meant into myself.

                                       I tried but found nothing. Their questions

                                       never stop. I feel my bones going off

                                       to preach on their own, each with a slightly

 

                                       different story.  ……

 

     Sarah is presented here as a tart-spoken elder, not afraid even of the angels or the God who has sent them:

 

                                      Angels are good for a laugh: they come up

                                      and they say: ‘God will give you a child.’

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

 

                                      They stand up indignant, unfold their wings,

                                      ‘You can’t laugh at God,’ one says.

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

        

                                      They leave in a flap and I have a wee boy

                                      called Isaac who name mean ‘he laughs’.

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

 

     Kinloch ends his work, appropriately, with a re-visitation to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth based on Rilke (and a photograph by PaJaMa) and a strange overlay of the homosexual poet Cavafy with a Syrian refugee from whom he hears in Glasgow, who demands that he go (perhaps like Mary Magdalene on an inner journey) to Alexandria. But in this poet’s world anything is possible, as the voice of the poem suddenly discovers that it is only “nineteen and a quarter / mile from Glasgow to Alexandria.” (In fact, there is a Scottish town named Alexandria new Glasgow.) Indeed, the world has shrunken. Dustie-Fute may exist just around the corner.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2019

Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend, Sunday, June 30, 2019.