In Search of Dustie-Fute

Here a lonely giraffe speaks from an abandoned zoo. Two young college dudes quote Rilke at each other. Cain’s wife, the Virgin Mary and that eternal stepdad St Joseph draw on memories they didn’t know they had. In this bestiary of forgotten voices, the search for Dustie-fute – the Scottish Orpheus – begins among the Parisian floods of 1910. There’s apocalypse and there’s salvage, elegy and humour, before the focus moves to the feisty figures of biblical women taking revenge on their men. Then back to Rilke for the meeting of Orpheus, Euridice and Hermes (via the prism of 20th century photography) before Dustie-fute’s final incarnation – as a Cavafy-reading Syrian refugee.

Reviews of In Search of Dustie-Fute

'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