Favourite poems

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Jackie Kay

It's harder to choose poems than to choose sweeties. There's an embarrassment of riches. In the end, I made my choice imagining that I was on a desert island and I wanted poems to remind me of the life I'd lived through poetry. So here's my choice.

Burns because I loved the drama of Burns and Burns suppers, the idea that the haggis got its own poem and the knife got stabbed in, the supernatural drama of ‘Tam O'Shanter', the heart breaking beauty of the love poems and songs like ‘John Anderson, my jo'. Liz Lochhead because her Memo for Spring was electrifying. Here was a woman talking in her own voice. I read it and then I read it again and again. A lot of the expressions in it I know by heart. I liked the characters: daft Annie of the main street, her sister, the odd lovers that come and go leaving a ‘you shaped depression on my pillow.' Wole Soyinka. I remember he was the first African writer we studied at school and me being the only one in the class who got the completely irony of the lines ‘Friction caused – / Foolishly, madam – by sitting down, has turned / My bottom raven black' . Children used to ask me what colour my bottom was, and if it was the same colour as the rest of me! I always thought it a deeply weird question! Audre Lorde because she changed the way I looked at myself. Like all books that make a great impression on you, I remember exactly where I was when I first read it. Brixton, 1981, Brixton was burning. I loved ‘Harriet' and ‘A Litany for Survival' and the way that she blended African myth into her very contemporary American life. At university, my lecturer Grahame Smith asked me to pick a poem from The Penguin Book of American Verse . I chose Anne Sexton's very moving poem, ‘Unknown girl in the maternity ward', but when I started to lead the discussion in the seminar, my voice broke and all I could manage was ‘I think it's a very moving poem,' before swallowing hard and staring straight ahead. It still is.

Poems should move you. They are emotions jarred and contained – when you lift the lid, it all comes out. These poems moved me and held a mirror up to my life at different times. They also lit a path, kept me company, inspired and provoked me.

© Jackie Kay, 2008

About Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. She has published five collections of poetry for adults, all published by Bloodaxe – The Adoption Papers (winner of a Forward Prize, a Saltire Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award), Other Lovers (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Off Colour, shortlisted for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Award, Life Mask (2005) and Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007). Her first novel, Trumpet (Picador, 1998), won the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and The Authors' Club First Novel Award. She has written for the stage and television and worked with composer Mark Anthony Turnage. A collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking , was published in 2002. She is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature, Lead Advisor to the Literature Department at The Arts Council of Great Britain, and teaches creative writing at Newcastle University. She lives in Manchester with her son.

Jackie Kay's favourite poems

• Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘the birth in a narrow room’
• Robert Burns, ‘Willie Wastle’
• Fred D’Aguiar, ‘Mama Dot’
• Julia Darling, ‘End’
• Nick Drake, ‘Cartographer’
• Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Steam’
• Liz Lochhead, ‘Poem for My Sister’
• Audre Lord, ‘Harriet’
• Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Watergaw’
• Edwin Morgan, ‘From a City Balcony’
• Pablo Neruda, ‘Tonight I Can Write’
• Anne Sexton, ‘Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward’
• Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem
• Wole Soyinka, ‘Telephone Conversation’

Related links

Jackie Kay

• www.contemporarywriters.com
• www.poetryarchive.org