Are they brothers?
Friends? Beneath an arch a man in black
offers an apple, stalk down, to one in red.
Black doublet smiles at us.
Red doublet smiles at him.
Look hard and you will see behind their backs
a bird with outstretched wings. A swan?
An eagle?
              from ‘To a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber’

Finger of a Frenchman explores looking, and writing about looking: looking at surfaces and beyond them, at what is depicted and what is hidden in shadow, at how a transient chemistry of light may be fixed in colour and words.

Kinloch’s poems are portraits of artists and reflections on art through five centuries of the artistic bond between Scotland and France. John Acheson, Master of the Scottish Mint, takes Mary, Queen of Scots’ portrait for the Scottish coinage, Esther Inglis paints the first self-portrait by a Scottish artist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ticks off his portrait painter, Allan Ramsay, and Eugene Delacroix offers David Wilkie a brace of partridge for tea in Kensington. The Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and Charles Rennie Mackintosh bring the gallery into the twentieth century, where Kinloch considers the hybrid art of figures such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Watt and Douglas Gordon in analytical prose-poems.

In the book’s second part, a mini-epic of a seventeenth-century priest’s Grand Tour offers a reflection on the nature of Collection itself, whether of paintings or poems, the composing of fragments into a whole.


Cover painting: Crispin van den Broeck (1524-c. 1590), Two Young Men (detail). Copyright © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Contents

small pleasures
Five Portraits of Mary
    Mary Stuart’s Dream    13
    La Monnaie du Moulin    14
    A Coin    16
    Fotheringay, 1587    17
    Family    18
Resisting Hell    19
To a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber    21
Rousseau on Ramsay    24
Young Blade    25
Sir David Wilkie Administering Tea in Kensington    27
Sleuth
    1    The Company    30
    2    The Art    31
Disruption    37
Lob    39
In the rue Annette    42
A Backward Glance    43
Between the Lines    46
Mahlstick    48
The Pink House, Cassis    49
The Place de L’Institut    50
Eileen in a White Chair    52
Helping with an Enquiry    53
Small Pleasures    55
Only for One    62
Thyrsus    66
5/cinq    68
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Barbie Doll    69

finger of a frenchman
Finger of a Frenchman    73
After Words after Art    85

a cabinet of curiosities
Passover    97
Three Gaelic Versions
    On the Beach at Bosta    98
    poem/song/destiny    99
    The Crib    100
The Hangingshaw    101
Reading at the Kibble Palace, Glasgow    102
Second Poem of the Hip Bone    103
The Mocking Fairy    105
The Organ Bath    107
Sailing to Torcello    108
Edwin Morgan is eating an orange    109

Notes    110