I don't know why I used not to rate Jackie Kay, but it began early. Perhaps "Adoption Papers" ticked too many fashionable boxes. Perhaps I read one of her less successful prose pieces. Since then I've mostly liked the works of hers that I've stumbled across. So I thought it was time to read one of her books
"Later Love" was a light start. "The Spare Room"'s final stanza is the only worthwhile one. "Mugs" is more consistent. "Notice" is prose, so what are the line-breaks for? "Husky"'s ok. "Gone with the Wind" doesn't merit the space. I liked "Model", "Bronze", "The Mask of the Martyr" and "Two, Medicine Man".I can imagine some people lapping up "Rubble" and "End of the Line". I can imagine other people knocking off poems like "End of the Line" over lunchtime. "George Square" is prose expressing prosaic ideas which for some reason is interrupted by line-breaks. "High Land" falls back to the "End of the Line" standard.
She can do imagery like this -
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Of course there were the twin herons next day, years later, standing frozen in the heron way, staring cool and quiet from the fake island (p.45) |
though more often the words clutter the imagery, as in
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the past we shared feels flimsy like a dress bereft after a party when the body has climbed out of it and it is left lying carelessly on the bedroom floor. (p.55) |
Sometimes I don't understand the imagery. In
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Last autumn, the windscreen wipers sliced the windows of my big car in the pouring rain, over and over, folding in on each other, crossing themselves in prayer ... The trees have slowly been undressing their leaves (p.59) |
I don't get "crossing themselves", and I don't undress my clothes so I don't know what the trees are doing.
Overall I'm still not convinced. I couldn't warm to the love pieces - common sentiments expressed in familiar ways. I liked the "life mask" section - a new, post-breakup self created, birth-father met. Maybe some poems were written for particular audiences.
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