When my lover found a brand-new lover, / on the longest day of the year by far, / she asked if I would move in to the spare room.

Many of the poems in Jackie Kay’s superb new collection are about the painful break up of a relationship. Love poems of a different kind, they are reflections on a dying love. The past is reassessed, seen sometimes in a different light. But it would be wrong to see this book as gloomy or depressing. The ordering of the poems takes the reader on a journey to a new life, a new Spring, where hope lies.

The book opens with ‘Late Love’:

How they strut about, people in love, / how tall they grow, pleased with themselves, / their hair, glossy, their skin shining. / They don’t remember who they have been.

Later the poem reflects:

How dull the lot that are not in love. / Their clothes shabby, their skin lustreless; / how clueless they are, hair a mess; how they trudge / up and down streets in the rain.

The poem continues, but already we can see some of Kay’s techniques - her use of internal rhymes - lustreless/hair a mess. The fourth verse cranks this up somewhat. And in the last line, a single line, there’s another internal rhyme. Kay has a great way with last lines.

‘Skyscraper’ is a great poem:Where there is love, love is never wasted. / Wasted love like wasted food feeds nobody. It continues on in a series of double lines, where wasted love and its words are rotting, broken up like bits of thrown out food. Endearments are broken up, their syllables rearranged. These are old words thrown into the rubbish. It’s one of the best poems in the book, but this is a book full of first class poetry.

‘There’s Trouble For Maw Broon’ features a popular Scottish cartoon couple. Paw Broon has tidied himself up all of a sudden, keeping his moustache trimmed, buying new clothes, eating healthy food. Maw Broon is disgusted and suspicious at the sudden transformation. Eventually she realises that he’s having it off with someone else in their but ’n ben. This poem, written in Scots, is wonderfully humorous and yet set within a collection that is particularly focused on the break up of a relationship, it also has a poignant undertone.

Masks have a lot to do with the collection, appearing in a number of poems. Kay had a cast of her face done during the writing of some of these works, and a photograph of the resulting sculpture appears on the back cover of the book. Faces are masks, and the expressions we wear, that hide our true feelings. In the break up of a relationship, people wear masks, sometimes the mask of politeness as in ‘Mugs’:

The last bit of civilisation happened in the kitchen, / where, however much you were bitching at me or me you, / I still asked you if you wanted a cup of tea or coffee / and you, occasionally, not so often, asked me.

‘Notice’ is another great poem which ruefully notes the distractions and subsequent financial effects of a partner having an affair, in the accumulated parking tickets, higher charges when fines aren’t paid on time, and visa bills past their due date. Whereas in ‘Her’ the narrator reflects on the warnings others had given her about her partner.

‘Model’ is one of the poems dealing more obviously with the process of having your face cast, and yet it also threads through the pain of a lost love, and the need to deal with it and move on. This is a beautifully written poem. There’s a number of poems after this that continue the theme of masks and faces, and the process of modelling, before the book turns to Africa, and the narrator’s birth father. He’s a Christian convert who sees her as evidence of his past sin, and yet he reminisces on how all the women loved him in Scotland. This father figure turns up in a number of poems. And there’s a four poem sequence called ‘African Masks.’ Of these four, ‘Medicine Man’ and ‘Akweke’ are particularly well worth reading and again are among the gems of the collection.

After that the focus turns to Scotland and elderly parents getting ready to go to a peace rally, before moving on to a child moving down to England and losing their Scots tongue. And then it’s back to the lost relationship, and the things that can never be now - as in ‘Old Aberdeen.’ But the book moves towards hope and the image of Spring. Ultimately it is an uplifting collection. Intimate, lyrical, funny, and moving. Some of the work in this book, particularly some of the shorter poems like ‘Spoons’ just seem like perfection.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.