journey to the house of shaws
by Douglas Messerli
David Kinloch In My Father’s House (Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 2005)
The very first poem of the book, “I Set Off Upon My Journey to the House
of Shaws,” states the underlying theme of the collection—the death of the
poet’s beloved father—and reveals the associative relationship of words
throughout the text. The poem begins with a fairly straight-forward statement
of his father’s death and the receipt of a letter bearing “the story of
inheritance, / a round giftie, a square giftie and the niceties will fall
away.” One quickly perceives, however, that the “giftie” the poet receives is
not material as much as a thing of language; as he sets off to “the Tower of
Living Stone,” the poet is confused by his journey:
‘The House of Shaws!'
cried I,
‘What had my poor
father to do with the House of Shaws?’
The key is in the meaning: one has
only to “prospect” the “sediment” of “shaw,” to explore the etymological
remnants of the word—so my Webster’s dictionary (along with the poem) points
out—that signifies a small thicket (from the Scottish, “the stalks and leaves
of potatoes, turnips, and other cultivated root plants,” or what the poet
describes as “compacted ‘foliage of esculent roots’”) which, in its deeper
teutonic meaning signified “schawe,” a wood, a grove. The poet tips his hand,
helping the reader work within a process he must employ throughout the rest of
the book:
see how simply the
floors
collapse upon each
other
from the impact of
overloaded words:
And in a schaw, a litill thar beside
Thai
lugyt thaim, for it was nere the nycht
From the wood which gives shade,
also comes the word “shadow,” which relates to the “schawaldouris,” the
wanderers of the woods taken in mid-life, the ghosts among the “tubers of tall
towers.” In short, through his association of words, his father’s death does
indeed send him—along with his reader—on a journey to “the House of Shaws.”
Many of the poems contained in this volume, accordingly, concern ghosts,
not only the ghost and the accompanying memories of his dead father, but the
ghosts of other great men and poets who dissected the dead—whether they be the
noted doctors Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines or the great literary
dissector of death, Paul Celan. Some of the most touching poems in this volume
are Kinloch’s fascinating “translations” of Celan—which he describes as works
written “after” or “eftir the German”—into the Scots language of his father’s
old dictionary.
His “Ye caun tristly,” for example, is written after Celan’s “Du Darst
mich getrost,” translated into English by Pierre Joris as:
you may confidently
regale me with snow:
as often as I strode
through summer
shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree,
its youngest leaf
shrieked.
Kinloch’s “synthetic Scots” version
reads:
Ye caun traistly
ser me wi snaw:
whenever shouder tae
shouder
ah srapit thru simmer
wi the mulberry
its smaaest leaf
skreicht
The poet tells us that “traistly”
means “safely, “ser” serve, and “skreicht,” screeched. In both versions, we
clearly recognize that the summer walk through the “schwa” was so painfully
beautiful that the poet is willing to be “entertained” by or served up the snow
(what we recognize as standard symbol of death) as reward. The “skreicht,”
closer to Celan’s German “schrie,” more clearly suggests the anguished scream
of that exquisite suffering than the appropriate modern English word “shriek.”
Kinloch’s own appropriation of the language of the Scots dictionary, in
fact, is close to Celan’s appropriation of German and the various obscure word
combinations he created in his poetry. There is, moreover, an elegiac tone to
Kinloch’s work as he struggles through his linguistic layerings to further
understand his father and his relationship to him. But the distance between the
two is not only one of age and cultural roots grounded in different
“languages,” but lies in other deeply “buried” languages determined by
education and sexuality. “Inquisition,” in which the poet answers an
interviewer’s question about homosexuality, openly admits to the inevitable gap
between two loving beings:
The interviewer
asks me
‘what your father
would have
thought of it had
he lived?’
when I know he
knew,
dodged it every
time he looked at me
because I was a
mirror
and mourn him every
day
because he died
before he ever got to know me.
The fundamental concerns with association and miscomprehension are
expressed in more joyous and loony ways in Kinloch’s heady satire of Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, in which the
“father,” this time portrayed as a survivor of a shipwreck, entertains the King
of Talou with elaborately ongoing performances of The Mikado—to which he attaches stories of Stanley and
Livingstone—that move through the various villages of the Taloulian
empire.
Ultimately, we realize that this stunning interweaving of various
languages and cultures is, like Penelope’s daily act, a way of coping with
grief and loss:
A is for abbé, for abba
—that’s ‘Daddy’
in Hebrew,
Father of rose
and clerestory—
a rhyme scheme
to tie
this meandering
grief
down to the
point of its pain.
(from “Psychomachia”)
That Kinloch so brilliantly engages
the reader in his “meandering” journey of grief is a testament to his
embracement of so many linguistic realities through time and space. And in a
sense, and in a time when so many would isolate themselves in their own wails
of suffering, Kinloch helps us to understand that grief can and must be
shared—even the “soundless screams” of a boy in Bialystock, of a Dreyfus or
Anne Frank, a Pagliaccio—in order for mankind to survive.
Los Angeles, June 25, 2006
Reprinted from Shadowtrain
[England], No. 6 (July 2006).
