Iggleheim’s Ark
David Kinloch
Stewed Rhubarb Press
In 1524, with the backdrop of an apocalyptic prophecy, a German Count by the name of Iggleheim commissioned the construction of a giant ark, inundated with the same drive and peculiarities as many similarly excessive nobles across that time. This collection from David Kinloch, as the blurb suggests, is written as an extravagant and ill-fated attempt to save a compilation of beloved paintings from the impending apocalypse. Throughout the collection we are treated to a series of ekphrasis poems based on, one assumes, an assortment of famous paintings within the (to my limited knowledge) imagined archives. Re-imagined from its Biblical narrative and source, the collection begins with ‘Swifts’: ‘higher almost / than the air /’ as they ‘look down / upon a painted sea’, offering readers a pre-emptive template to perhaps question connections between the transcendental nature and role of art and an intermediary urgency to be preserved.
Throughout the collection, there are immediate references in the poem titles to animals; ‘Swifts’ ‘Monkeys’, ‘Tigers’ etc, juxtaposed to their placement within given bodies of art; ‘I have been on this boat for centuries / ...I am the ark’ (‘Rhinoceros’). ‘...the refractory is an ark. Sometimes/he utters a piercing cry / which fills it to the brim’. (‘Peacock’)
The use of anachronism throughout the collection is also an intriguing choice, allowing readers to drift across different time periods through the variety of paintings as well as variations on ships to sail across with ‘first a ferry from Constantinople, / a sloop, a schooner, several / dubious rafts. And they say Time / advances like progress’ (‘Rhinoceros’).
Interspersed between the allegorical painted animals framed within poems are interjections of the real world, frivolities of dealing with the abject mundane realities, such as dealing with construction of the ark; ‘Today, I plank the inside bulwark /with walnut strips placed vertically, / use spacers to align the hull and castle.’ (‘A Model Ship’) to ‘the roof of the ark is open to the summer / sky...’ whilst in pensive ponder of what is to come like ‘murmuration / across painted skies’ (‘Constellation’).
This collection reads like an echo of classic fables and mythic tales with strong residual and inherent imagery and references to Biblical texts, whilst still managing to place importance on the imagination of humankind’s accomplishments, the thematic core gyrates around preservation through an art collection, perhaps as a nod to Keats’ discourse on the topic or just an unravelling of ‘a tapestry woven from unicorn thread’ that ‘then unfolds from the mind like a poem’ (‘The Unicorn rests in a Garden’).
—Shehzar Doja