It is almost 20 years since the publication of Jackie Kay's first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers: a charged, autobiographical exploration of identity, race, relationships and parenthood that used dramatis personae to arresting effect. These themes have sustained her work since, with novels, plays, poetry collections and children's books establishing her reputation for writing candidly with wit, insight and humour. Kay's poems are notable not so much for their stylistic originality as for deftly drawing on the most personal of subject matters the highs and lows of relationships, her sense of place and home, attempts to define herself alongside a complex background without lapsing into solipsism or alienating the reader.
Combined with a knack for capturing the rhythms of everyday talk and conjuring believable characters, these qualities have seen Kay able to communicate the highly personal in a relatable, wholly public fashion.
Her latest collection, Fiere, is no exception. Billed as the "lyric counterpart" to her recent memoir, Red Dust Road, which maps Kay's search for her Nigerian birth father and Highland birth mother, it is a book unsurprisingly concerned with family and relationships. From the opening title poem "fiere" is an old Scots word meaning "companion" or "mate" a warm, capacious optimism is apparent, telling of a lasting friendship with songlike rhythms, bubbly rhymes, and a hectic mix of new and old Scots dialect: "O'er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie, / I'd defend you you, me; blithe and blatter, / here we gang doon the hill, nae matter, / past the bracken, bonny braes, barley, / oot by the roaring sea, still havin a blether."
As throughout, the use of vernacular here serves to bolster the sentiment: the poem may offer nothing especially thought-provoking in its cheery address, but in balancing sincerity with knowingness and uncertainty, Kay succeeds in invoking such feelings genuinely and openly.
Many of these poems, though, are concerned with communicating much more complex emotions, often in a way that can make them more richly even more variously understood. Communication being key: Kay is aware that it is not enough to merely provoke emotion if a poem is to allow for a fuller understanding of how and why people interact and feel the way they do. In the poignant "Burying My African Father", for instance, the poet's difficult encounters with her birth father and her corresponding need to commune with "the home of the ancestors", lead to her difficult decision to "bury him right here in my head". The resolve of the final full-rhymed couplet comes as a shock in an otherwise delicate poem, paradoxically leaving a feeling of open-endedness. A similar suspension occurs amid the bustle of "Ukpor Market": thinking the Nigerian Igbo women's call of "oyinbo" means that they identify with her, the poet is delighted ("a row of women / with my face"), until she discovers it to be a pidgin word for "white woman", and the poem stalls. In both cases, Kay conjures a situation without offering clear judgment, leaving us to determine its intricate resonance.
Elsewhere, attempts are made to bridge the gap between differing cultures and conflicting attitudes through embracing ritual. Adopting the Igbo style of bathing, for example, the poet finds herself "building up a rhythm that felt / ancient, mythic", before the practice achieves a sort of spiritual transport, cumulative end-rhymes and vowel sounds mirroring her actions: "years back, inside the body / of my grandmother; bathing the Igbo way / I am a split second, a spit and a jump away."
But as in "Egusi Soup", where the act of breaking bread seems to bring Kay closer to her difficult birth father, it can't be long before the spell is broken. As the poet says, it's "as if he were from a fable or fairytale", though the failure to explore the fact that it is one of her own creations is a telling example of the occasionally frustrating oversimplification at work in some of these poems, perhaps borne of a cautiousness about more fully engaging with the difficult history lurking beneath.
Generous and optimistic as her outlook is, however, Kay rarely shies away from difficult choices. Sometimes, common ground or meaningful understanding can't be found and, like the zebra in "Brockit" that is "unco proud o' its difference", the poems also accept and celebrate this as part of cultural diversity and individuality. But compassion and a desire for broader empathy linger even in the more coolheaded writing here, with the winding lines of "Road to Amaudo", a manifesto piece of sorts, describing a route "at times impassable: / but pass people do", "hefting the load / of hope on their backs". The loving detail, hypnotic rhythms and unflinching realism of such poems make for Fiere's most memorable moments, by turns affecting and cerebral.
The collection is also peppered with ekphrastic pieces that, aside from offsetting the book's lyrical, personal focus, exhibit Kay's gift for ventriloquism; one gives voice to the irksome mother of the De Vegh twins from Alice Neel's portrait in particularly brilliant fashion.
These poems, in which Kay's depictions of relationships are loosened from their semi-autobiographical tethers, also approach a satisfying, brooding darkness that is often lacking elsewhere. But from "Fiere Love Poem" and its passion that goes "on and on" to the bereft "Woman at a Window" who has become "all shadow", it all serves to make Fiere a richly varied inquiry into the relationships that define us.
Ben Wilkinson's The Sparks is published by Tall-Lighthouse.
