The Scottish author and poet is a warm, wry companion in an autobiographical collection of poems, written in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths

An autobiographical collection by the poet and former Makar of Scotland, Jackie Kay, May Day comprises vivid snapshots of its author’s life, written in the aftermath of her adoptive parents’ deaths; her father died in 2019 and her mother in early 2021. In the opener, Mull, she recalls her father with a “tartan blanket around his shoulder, his staff in his right arm, defending us – his black children – on this island against all harm”. In Daughters, Neighbours, a paean to grief addressed to a friend who has also lost a parent, she asks: “What are we without our mothers? We who loved them through these long, long years. Here we are both turning sixty walking grief’s long corridor … knowing we could not have given more.” Elsewhere, in A Life in Protest, Kay recalls her activism, from the early Reclaim the Night marches and the Greenham Common protests where she joined women with “their tents and woolly jumpers, camp stoves and tin mugs of tea” to the Black Lives Matter protests.

As narrator, Kay is warm, wistful and full of impish charm as she moves between past and present. Her poems are littered with references to cultural giants, among them Audre Lorde, Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson and Nina Simone (she saw the latter perform at London’s Jazz Cafe in 1983). Yet Kay’s mother is the most constant presence: in My Mother Is a Robin, the poet imagines her as a series of birds flying close to her “as if to say: ‘Here I am, here I am. My daughter, can’t you see me? Can’t you hear my song?’”