Kinloch was part of a group of Scottish writers including Robert Crawford, who met at Oxford University in the 1980s and who then went on to publish their own work, edit that of the others and perform together. He was for many years known as one of the editors of the influential magazine Verse. He moved on in the early nineties to editing Southfields with Richard Price.

By this time he had published a number of small pamphlets and become identified with a group known as the Informationists, who included Peter McCarey and Alan Riach among their numbers. The Informationists, as their name implied, were interested in the aesthetics of information, and were influenced by MacDiarmid’s later ‘poetry of fact’. Other influences include the New York poet Frank O’Hara, about whom he has written powerfully and sensitively.

Kinloch’s interest in French writing and his continually-developing exploration of gay sensibility mean he produces a stylistically diverse, emotionally direct body of writing incorporating the prose poem, Scots, and the use of unusual historical perspective to produce a richly literate work, at once erotically charged and shot through with both poignancies and irony.