6/28/2023 0 Comments Jackie kay memoirI was interested in how fluid identity can be, how people can reinvent themselves, how gender and race are categories that we try to fix, in order perhaps to cherish our own prejudices, how so called extraordinary people can live ordinary lives.’ In an online interview for her American publisher, Random House, Kay said that ‘I don't think I ever set out to write with a message in mind. Her next adult collection, Other Lovers (1993) also revolved around a quest for identity, but this time particularly with regard to colonial histories and slavery the musical theme that appears in her poems about Bessie Smith was taken up in fictional form in Trumpet (1998), the story of a jazz trumpeter – again told through several voices – whose death reveals ‘him’ to have been a woman. Written in the three voices of an adoptive mother, a birth mother and an adopted child, it evidenced what were to be continuing strengths of Kay’s work: the ability to articulate a wide range of emotional experiences, firmly rooted in everyday life, and a keen sense of socio-political realities combined with a deep faith in the transformative powers of human love. Jackie Kay's first collection of poems, The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe, 1991), was immediately recognised as an outstanding debut, and gained the Saltire Society Award for best first book, as well as a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
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