Bantam by Jackie Kay ( Picador )

Bantam by Jackie Kay review – home truths from a goddess of small things.Jackie Kay depicts a world of grief, joy, love and humour in the sparest terms. ‘Who could resist a poem called Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk?’

This collection is a pick-me-up – fresh, upbeat and sympathetic. The tone is partly a matter of temperament. Jackie Kay writes about the past with uncommon spirit. She makes you realise how often poetry that looks backwards is written with a dead hand, how often, in memorialising verse, the unsmilingly elegiac obtains. She, by contrast, is loving, non-reverential and interested in the human predicament – in being quick not dead. Remembering the novelist Julia Darling in Hereafter Julia she exclaims: “Why – even dead, Julia, you’re still the life and soul.” And if you read the Guardian obituary Kay wrote about her friend, this is confirmed as she quotes Darling declaring she was “in no pain unless she tried to dance the hokey cokey”.

When Jackie Kay closes one door, she opens another. There is a long poem, Threshold, about life’s doors and the collection can be considered in terms of its exits and entrances. She holds open a door into Scotland, imagines friends and refugees in a “building of pure poetry”. But having your heart in the right place would be no good were your pen to stray. Hers does not. Her poems are clear, skilfully engineered, and Threshold ends in an exuberant outbreak of foreign tongues before settling down into: “Wan patter is naer enough.” I am intrigued by the way Scottish dialect dresses – sometimes redresses – its subjects. How successful the national costume proves. Take A Day Like Today, which describes the sort of duff day that might seem past redemption. It begins: “If every there wis a day/A doon about the mooth day…” One wonders why “doon about the mooth” is so much perkier than “down in the mouth”. In plain English, the poem would be plainer, the day less worth recording. Perhaps it is the taste – the trace – of Burns, bracing as malt whisky.

Small – essential that the poem itself be small – is a good example of Kay’s understanding that less can be more. It is a measure of her attractive poetic maturity that overstatement is resisted, that simple measures suffice. Smallness features elsewhere too – in Bantam, the nickname for the short soldier her grandfather once was. And the second stanza of Welcome Wee One begins: “O ma darlin wee one/The hale world welcomes ye…”

But Kay is as assured taking on the “hale world”. In Planet Farage, she takes aim at Ukip: “We closed the borders, folks, we nailed it./No trees, no plants, no immigrants./No foreign nurses, no doctors; we smashed it.” She smashes it – an entertaining and deadly bull’s eye. Kay’s adoptive parents, John and Helen Kay, would have approved. He worked for the Communist party, she was the Scottish secretary of CND and in April Sunshine she writes a protest poem about protesters, presumably her parents, now elderly patients in a hospital, no longer recognised for the things that make them tick: worthy vitriol, a passion for social justice. Yet what makes the poem refreshing is that instead of tub-thumping to the bitter end, she lets April sunshine, a neutral blessing, bookend the poem.

There are so many delightful poems here. I loved Perfume, about trying in vain to make scent out of rose petals (I recognise the futile enterprise from childhood), and who could resist a poem with the title Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk? Silver Moon is another fine poem about the now closed feminist bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road: “And by the silvery light of the bookshop you grew up/By the open door, standing alone, together.” Another of Kay’s splendid doors in this welcoming – and welcome – gathering.


It’s always the small that
gets you, a wee act
of kindness, the tiniest detail,
a stranger’s caress,
your heart, the way you react
when faced with the trials.
The gift of a bluebell, an embrace,
Oh – the yellow gorse,
the small brown foals,
the crows lined up
from the train window.
Beauty, inches close to sorrow.

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