Humour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay's part of the equation. "Darling" brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, "The Adoption Papers", "Other Lovers", "Off Colour" and "Life Mask", as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay's poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, "Why Don't You Stop Talking", could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.
Darling: New & Selected Poems
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Kay's DARLING locates her alongside Ted Hughes even T.S. Eliot in that elite group whose children's writing, rather than gainsaying their primary poetic project, informs and enriches it...One of Kay's greatest strengths is the way she locates individual experience in the collective. As befits an adoptive daughter of peace marchers, Kay is a writer for whom the personal is indeed political... Even such a public poet as Kay, though, writes verse shaped above all by human cadence. She has an immaculate ear for speech patterns, using accent and dialect, in particular, to lift and characterise. --Fiona Sampson, Guardian
DARLING is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night. --Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year)
This poet's history a black child adopted and reared in Scotland and the personae that have shone from her previous books in many genres since her first collection, The Adoption Papers, make reforging this particular identity an unusually complex matter. In different forms, tones and voices, these poems flicker fascinatingly between oppositions...The poems explore authenticity, allegiance, origins and memory through multiple masks. --Ruth Padel, The Independent
DARLING is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night. --Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year)
This poet's history a black child adopted and reared in Scotland and the personae that have shone from her previous books in many genres since her first collection, The Adoption Papers, make reforging this particular identity an unusually complex matter. In different forms, tones and voices, these poems flicker fascinatingly between oppositions...The poems explore authenticity, allegiance, origins and memory through multiple masks. --Ruth Padel, The Independent
About the Author
Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain's best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, which has been adapted for both radio and stage, is published by Bloodaxe in 2008. Jackie Kay's fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998) and two collections of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking? (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children's poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She lives in Manchester, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An excellent selection, although the whole of 'The Adoption Papers' would have been welcome.
a a gates
a a gates
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Generous selection of poems from a fine Scots poet
2 Nov 2008
By Jessica Weissman
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Jackie Kay has several volumes of poetry out for adults and a few more for children. This volume selects from nearly all of them. The children's books are lots of fun, and let her show a lighter side. The adult poems are heartfelt and sometimes funny.
An unusual mind, willing to let readers have a little pleasure and fun with words, and some of the best work on adoption (from all three points of view) ever. No, I'm not a black Scot Lesbian adopted by a straight white couple. But I have just a little insight into it from someone who can also write about schoolyard stuff and even some about what the Scots think of us Sassenachs.
An unusual mind, willing to let readers have a little pleasure and fun with words, and some of the best work on adoption (from all three points of view) ever. No, I'm not a black Scot Lesbian adopted by a straight white couple. But I have just a little insight into it from someone who can also write about schoolyard stuff and even some about what the Scots think of us Sassenachs.
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