David Kinloch: In
My Father's House
(Carcanet, Manchester, 2005; paperback,
128pp, £8.95; isbn 1857547667)
I get the feeling that David Kinloch is a very skilful poet who
isn't entirely sure what to do with this skill or with what degree
of intensity it should operate. That's not just verbal skill, poetical
dexterity, but the multiplied attention to the world that comes
with it, the constant sense of relatedness in experience. Certainly
in his best poems this hestitation is resolved and the skill becomes
its own guarantor.
The skill is in the emotional accuracy with which the dramatic
self-addressing voice moves at speed among percepts to form
narratives or accounts proceeding from unit to unit, song-like
from verse to verse, in a steady and sometime relentless music
which attaches the reader as a kind of conspirator in questioning the
world. Thus –
But my eyes are full
of that last dark canvas:
a deer at bay in a forest glade
and I hear the word ‘see'
lost among bodies and skies.
at the end of a three-page poem concerning Constable but, typically,
inserting veiled fragments of autobiography, homosexual experience,
in other places, which converge onto this ending so that
what is tied up finally is so much more than any poem bound
to its "subject" could
hope for. The skill is in the unity and continuity of each of these
short lines, the play of subsumed perceptual conflicts (eyes /
dark, hear / see, bodies / skies) held together by the picture
in the middle: the threatened animal in a clearing, the joining
of clarity with lament (eyes full as of tears / trapped in the
clearing / the loss of the word 'see' in darkness and ight). And
not only that – also rhythm used in something like the way
Graham used it – the augmenting stresses which power the
first four lines, giving into the trochaic lightness of the
last two, a dance-like envoi. It is plaintive of course.
Most of the book is plaintive except where it enters into
longer prosaic modes full of invention.
There is a very strong surface awareness of language, its innate
properties and its powers of transportation. The skill sets
up a kind of tapestry or veil of poetical presence through
which the text's human concerns emerge in varying degrees of
opacity, or sometimes hardly at all. The central issue is the poet's
father and the blurb produces the usual: ". . . exploration of his
relationship with his father". I don't think he explores anything.
I think he remembers his father, sequentially, and the enunciation
of these memories progresses from poem to poem through the
book, bringing the whole thing close to a unity, but with
the focus variously dispersed, abandoned, recovered. But
it is as if it is a painful process to bring these memories into
language through the textures of the writing and through the different
kinds of poem, as if they resist it. Comparatively direct memoir-poems
near the beginning give way to poems in which the father
may emerge unexpectedly near the end, or be interjected in disguise
(e.g. as David Livingstone) or hardly be manifest at all
except in implication. There is an uncertainty here, not necessarily
disabling, as to how opaque the poem should be, how much of the
inner address should be sealed within its own idiolect, so that
the poems vary from clarity to cryptic. But the clarity is always
obliquely gained.
Before the days of Google you would have needed any number of
dictionaries, encyclopaedias, maps and atlases . . . and
still some terms would defeat you, and still do, though the
defeat is never more than partial in any one poem. The reason
for this lies in the mode of self-address, as the narrator of the poem,
normally unambiguously identified with the author, mulls over
his own past and experience, making a careful monologue out of
it which only posits a listener momentarily or obliquely. Or it posits
a listener like a kindred who already knows. Most nouns are introduced
by "the" as
referring to an established identity. So the reader is thrown into
an arena of the poet's psyche without a lifebelt and will sink
or swim, will survive the mystique or not. It is a powerful mode
carefully handled by Kinloch – there is always an allure
to persuade us into this clouded seeing. It reminds me sometimes
of the German poet Johannes Bobrowski, who frequently operated
in a similar way, with the difference that his terms of reference
all emanated from a singular vision of a partly imagined place
and its history, almost a world, woven into a whole aspect of German
transcendental theology and philosophy. So they add to and clarify
each other from poem to poem. By comparison Kinloch's world is
his own emotional life which is born with him to widely divergent
places with their own inhabitants, and through which his own figures,
especially his father, swim upwards towards the surface of the
text. Some poems get quite perverse in this obstinate and exclusive
immersion of the poet's psyche into what he contemplates, such
as Song which concerns Weimar, Schubert and Heidegger in a way
which only realisation of Kinloch's particular take on those things
could render meaningful. The technique (the skill) inevitably narrows
the cultural scope – it is really getting more difficult
these days to mention "Schubert" in a poem and assume
every worthy poetry reader is at once with you, let alone "Fichte" or "Heidegger".
There is a touch of bullying here.
It is nevertheless a valuable mode, and seasoned readers of modern
poetry, who are implied in Kinloch's writing, are probably
by new inured to meeting intractable obstacles as they proceed
through a poem, and jumping over them. Like suddenly an adjective "laral" (from
larynx, or lares, or neither?) or "A boy with wings in old
Aubert's dream" (the French composer?? surely not. Here Google
admits defeat). Or passing "Vineuil's sonata" having
forgotten that he's a composer invented by Proust, or never having
read The Chronicles of Narnia so that "Cair Paravel" doesn't
mean over much. I think these are small prices to pay for
the challenge of a textuality which so diversifies and connects
our common percepts. Or, squeezed dangerously into the author's
dream we emerge to our own newly realised. It is Kinloch's
best mode, and I find him weaker when he occasionally steps
out of it, as in a plain poem about his own sexuality, Inquisition,
in which while correctly defending himself against enforced
guilt he emerges rather aggressive and resentful.
There is an interesting prose piece, Painting by Numbers in which
he seems to expound his aesthetic method through an account
of an imaginary painter. "He wanted neither abstraction nor representation
but a fluid, tactile métissage." It's typical of a
weakness of the approach that a perfectly unproblematic concept, "cross-breeding",
has to go into French – to what purpose other than re-establishing
a certain authorial disdain? And disdain is implied in the entire
technique of non-disclosure, almost as if experience is too precious
to be risked to the unknown identities of transmissive language.
Bobrowski may well have felt this about the entire mundus (if I
may speak it without disdain) of his oeuvre, but what Kinloch protects
is more of an individual fate. Anyway, crossed between abstract
and representation is what it is, though that makes more sense
in painting than in text, where we don't quite know what "abstract" is.
Kinloch equates it with the opaque (but surely to Stevens, for
instance, it meant something like the reverse of that, the removal
of substance from the selfhood to where it can be more fully known).
He speaks of the fascination of words (old Scottish words) which
you don't entirely know and can use your imagination on to "cross" what
you suppose in them with the traces of recognition that still linger
on them. Only the whole poem will realise this possible creative
engagement of quite opposed forms of recognition, by bringing them
together onto what Kinloch would call a "threshold".
The poem becomes a borderline experience between the known
and the unknown, the point of transformation, the threshing
place. I think these possibilities are expertly realised
in, above all, the most disclosive and anecdotal poems of his memory
of his father, where common fate, common son/daughter-hood,
common sense of lost time and lost connection, hold the reader
intact through the subjective passage to emerge at the doorway.
But not when he indulges Martianisms! It must be a danger of
this reluctant mode and its figurative density that sometimes
it falls into shallow metaphors – "Nicotine-skinned September
snaps" . . . "the pentacled core of your hands" .
. . or his father searching for a picnic sight – "Months
ahead he'd hunter-gather miles of motorway". Such figures
don't extend the percept, but merely tempt the reader into a "knowing" connivance.
Included are ten versions of poems by Paul Celan, rendered into
what I believe is a more-or-less synthetic Scots. This language
is spoken of in Painting by Numbers in terms of its enticing opacity,
its half-familiarity, its sense of alienated belonging. Rendering
Celan into a footnoted semi-obscured language seems a strange exercise,
though the result must vary with the reader's degree of Scottishness.
Celan's German, however difficult, was not removed from currency
in this way. In fact the poems seem to me to work very well, though
Tenebrae comes out like something from a Presbyterian sermon (as
possibly the original did) and some lines feel colloquialised.
This may be an English reading, as may my satisfaction with the
tough, consonant-ridden, rhythmically abrupt Scots as a vehicle
for Celan's desperate splintering.
But I wonder uneasily about the purpose of these translations,
for they transgress the normal bounds of the book and bring
in a load of large-scale implications and a kind of intensity
otherwise absent (though this would have been much less stark
if Todesfuge had not been included). Is it an attempt at a solidarity
of the oppressed, the Scottish, the gay, and the persecuted
of Central Europe? If so it's precarious, given the immense historical
distinctions to be made. I feel that such exercises make too
much of a myth out of Celan, as against a delightful version
Kinloch does into colloquial Glaswegian from the Arabic of Mou'in Bsissou,
praising "old
bampot Rimbaud" (footnote: a nutcase) for giving poetry the
V-sign rather then continuing it in diminished intensity.
No beams of sacred suffering playing around here. In any
event, if the Celan versions are assimilated to the father
narrative that threads though the book they cast a very dark light
on it not in evidence elsewhere.
Big questions are not raised in David Kinloch's poetry; there
is no move to the outside. What we are offered is the life we know,
the life with fathers and sons, with death-broken ties and unfulfilled
relationships, and the questing perception viewing experience across
these scenarios. It is a disturbed world, but disturbed from within.
The familiar is viewed as through squint-mirrors and, at best,
is cast back to us as something surprisingly and disturbingly luminous.
Kinloch manages to be very new and fresh, very new and Scottish,
and very expert in evocative figurative display to the extent
that "experimental" might
describe some of the pieces, while at the same time conforming
to what seems now to be considered the normal and proper purpose
of the poem – to talk your life. In this he is typical of
a number of younger poets who are gaining good reputations
in some kind of synthesis, mainly by employing a modernistic
virtuosity in a mode of almost 18th-Century mundanity. That
is to say, an anti-metaphysical mode, in which reference is back
to the known description of what we are, which the poetry confirms.
Kinloch is capable of such tender force that he wears the
surface of this structure down to a skein, a transparency. And
then the goal to which experience is directed becomes the earth.
First half of the poem Remission –
The rash of russet earth.
Strewn. For remission.
In the autumn
remission came for him,
folded back the cancer
and he seized the winter
space it left him, filled
it with his fruits, his songs
and in the glacial energy
of love borrowed from death
we were born.
Copyright © Peter Riley, 2006. All
quotations are copyright © David
Kinloch, 2005.
