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Greengown

New and Selected Poems

David Kinloch

Cover of Greengown by David Kinloch
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, LGBTQ+, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (144 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2022)
9781800172791
£15.99 £14.39
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(Pub. Nov 2022)
9781800172807
£12.79 £11.51
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • 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.
    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, the latest being In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017) which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. He has degrees in French and English from the Universities ... read more
    Awards won by David Kinloch Winner, 2022 Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) Short-listed, 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award (In Search of Dustie-Fute) Commended, 2011 The Scotsman's Book of the Year (Finger of a Frenchman) Winner, 2004 Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award
    'As others have noted, this is a poet who can be tender, playful, sarcastic... This is a poet who lives in art and the world and moves between difficult realms as easily as the pedlar, troubadour, 'dustie-fute' who is the presiding spirit of his work.'
    Kathleen McPhilemy, The High Window
    'Greengown: New and Selected Poems is a landmark book for David Kinloch. He was probably the first gay poet in the UK to address the AIDS crisis as it was happening, with a style that alternated crystal-clear lyric poems with rich prose poetry. His body of work is recognised for its humour, historic resonance and humanity.'
    Richard Price, The Poetry Society


    'His work exemplifies a particularly queer style. I mean that in every sense. It is unflinching in talking about gay life and experience, but it is also askance, unsettling, always either swerving or tripping the reader. It is, as well, quair, as in the old Scots for a book. It is a bookish book. If anyone deserves to be considered the heir to Edwin Morgan, I would suggest it be Kinloch.'
    Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
    Praise for David Kinloch  'David Kinloch is 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.'
    Douglas Messerli, Hyperallergic
     'Skill and vitality make this handsome publication a true and tender elegy for pleasures shared and love recalled.'
    Herald Scotland
    'A sparkling collection: full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father 'and then/I let him go,/but this moment/which is far the hardest pain/remains'. But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; tightly drawn translations of Celan into Scots; and a most impressive long poem,  'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body  of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked  Middle East of the seventeenth century.'
    Edwin Morgan
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