RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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Poetry of praise and protest
RUTH AYLETT recommends a new collection that is direct and open to all, both conversational and radical
mayday
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May Day
By Jackie Kay, Picador
£10.99
Jackie Kay has been a leading British poet for a good 30 years and she was Scotland’s Makar (poet laureate) from 2016-21. Her poetry is direct and open to all, and her voice is distinctive: both conversational and radical.
May Day is her latest collection. Its title has two meanings, represented by two poems, one called MayDay, and the other May Day. The first is a signal of distress at the recent deaths of her parents, while the second is a celebration of their activist lives as committed socialists and trade unionists, including many years in the British Communist Party.
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