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Finger of a FrenchmanDavid Kinloch10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Aug 2011) 9781847778055 £9.95 £8.96 Paperback (Pub. Apr 2011) 9781847770745 Out of Stock To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
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
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
Praise for David Kinloch
'The multi-layered richness of the poems, varied in form and subject as they are, drew me in, even as they encouraged and required me to educate myself on Scottish terms and history.'
Jeff Gundy, Poetry Salzburg '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 '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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Un Tour D'Ecosse
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