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Un Tour D'Ecosse

David Kinloch

Cover Picture of Un Tour D'Ecosse
Categories: 21st Century, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2001)
9781857545166
Out of Stock
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  • 'Areesaig', Morrarr...'
    the beach stands up
    in little whirlwinds of ash
    in my Hispanic mouth,

    the dunes become chintz
    statues of white sand
    poodles with griffon beaks.

    Mannerism of stranded sea-horses!
    Salute a small poet
    murdered for being red and gay.


    from 'Lorca on Morar'

                
    Un Tour d'Ecosse provides a vision of Scotland from the handlebars of the ecologically friendly machine the French call 'la petite reine'. Here are poems of loss and desire, poems in Scots and English and poetry in English about Scots. There is an ode addressed to a poet by a cockroach, and a hippopotamus migrates from a New York Hotel to the Venetian lagoon. Burns, Frank O'Hara, Apollinaire and Mel Gibson have parts to play and there are elegies for the film-maker Derek Jarman and the French writer Herve Guibert. An extended sequence features a fantasy bicycle race around Scotland modelled on the famous Tour de France with Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca in the yellow jersey. From Sauchiehall Street to Carradale, Dunkeld to the Orkneys, here is Scotland as it has never been seen before.

    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
    Praise for David Kinloch '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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