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.

Here the personal and the political truly walk hand-in-hand. In a Life in Protest, Kay remembers her own times, from an anti-Polaris demo and the visit of Madame Allende soon after Pinochet’s coup, all the way through the first Pride, the growth of feminism and a visit to Greenham Common, to taking the knee “for a full nine minutes for George Floyd, and the rest” in her local park. 

The piece about May Day itself talks about joining the Glasgow march as a child: “You chanted all the way down the Broomielaw/ to Queen’s Park, in a green dress, brown shoes/ campaneros and comrades at your side/ …/ You’d see all the familiars, Auntie this,/ Uncle that, the Party blood, through the veins!”

Her parents loved to sing, and poems cover Paul Robeson’s first visit to Glasgow (a family story from before Kay was born); Peggy Seeger (who came round to tea with them); Nina Simone; Harry Belafonte.

In Three Little Birds, she’s in the ambulance with her newly dead mum’s body when the first responder’s phone goes off, and its ringtone is the not-very-appropriate “Don’t worry, about a thing.” He apologises, and Kay comments: “She would have laughed her/ head off, I said, longing for her to join in, sit up. Sing!”

There’s a moving sequence of Mother’s Day pieces from 2020 to 2022. In the first, her mother, still alive, is in a care home, and because of covid they can only talk by phone: “but she couldn’t hear a single thing/ except when I shouted, I love you. I love you, precious,/ she said. Then the line went dead.”  

By Mother’s Day 2021 she has died: “You don’t stop being my mum because you’re dead.” And for Mother’s Day 2022 Kay remembers her mother going through her address book: “She’s dead. Oh my. They’re dead. Oh Jesus./ And now, though I can barely believe it, you are —”

This collection also includes some of her commissioned Makar’s poems. She wrote three for the Installation Black Burns at the Scottish National Gallery riffing on Burns pieces. One imagines what would have happened to Burns, and what we would have lost, had he actually sailed to Jamaica to manage a plantation of the enslaved. The other two rework Burns’ frequent references to “lassies” to talk about her wife: thinking about growing old together, thinking back to how they met and were then at last able to marry.

But though there is deep grief, Kay never loses sight of life’s struggles, and her own commitment, as well as her that of her parents: to be on the side of everyone fighting for a better future. She finishes a longer piece, Farewell 2020, written as a script for a film about Hogmanay, with the couplet: “We say Wha’s like us, singing ‘Auld lang Syne’./  We share the planet’s air. What’s yours is mine.”