POEM OF THE WEEK

David Kinloch’s latest volume of verse is In Search of Dustie-fute (Carcanet, £9.99). Who is Dustie-fute? The collection’s blurb offers some guidance: “A fellowship of strangers across time: free spirits, survivors.” That might describe Muhammed, the character who contacts the narrator of Kinloch’s poem “Text” via the gay dating app Scruff. The poem is a small, modern-day comedy of errors, with the voice narrating the poem assuming the Alexandria Muhammed is based in must be the Egyptian one. It turns out this Alexandria is up the road, in Dunbartonshire. This in turn leads to thoughts about the Egyptian poet Cavafy, while Muhammed waits at the other end of the app for the poet to reply.

Muhammed texts me on Scruff from Alexandria. I mention Cavafy and he asks me when I’ll visit. I think of Egypt, Shakespeare. Never, I reply, It’s too far. Then I clock he means the one in West Dunbartonshire and blush. Cavafy was Greek, he says. I’m Syrian and a refugee. Constantine Cavafy would have known just what to say then from his careful room. He dealt in exiles mainly, some refugees, and had a knack for letting the window veil blow back at the turn of a line so we can see young Antony glint briefly from his high abandoned tower block, sense his fate blow out along the second-best streets of a second-hand city. Muhammed is waiting for me to reply as I write this poem. It is nineteen and a quarter miles from Glasgow to Alexandria. You can find copies of In Search of Dustie-fute by David Kinloch at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. For poetry enquiries, e-mail reception@spl.org.uk or visit www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk.