From the Archives: Star Poet Wows Festival Audience
Revisiting a McLellan Festival treat with Jackie Kay
Issue 20 – September 2012
Poetry is not usually reckoned to be a show-stopping entertainment, but last night, Friday, 31st August, a packed crowd in Brodick Hall realised that poet and novelist Jackie Kay is a phenomenal star, and their clapping and cheering was so enthusiastic that she had to do an encore. Jackie had been invited to give a reading of her own work and to judge the £1,000 poetry competition run by the McLellan Festival, but even the organisers had not quite realised quite what an astonishing performer she is. Gales of laughter alternated with rapt silence as Jackie read – or more often, recited from memory – one poem after another.
Forget wandering lonely as a cloud or waxing lyrical about daffodils. Forget the jog trot of the boy on the burning deck. Jackie’s poetry is immediate and real, about life as she finds it, in all its absurdity and its powerful moments of tenderness. She can write about a desperately sick baby and about love between friends yet in the next moment deliver a piece about the trials of trying to diet that has the audience rocking with laughter. She has the born comedian’s mordant eye contact and wicked smile, yet radiates a genuine friendship and the wry, Glasgow-born humour that knows you’re done for if you don’t find something to laugh at. Born of a Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby, and the Brodick audience was touched to see that her much-loved Scottish mum and dad had come with her to the Festival. Her account of finding her African father when she was in her forties and he seventy-five was at the same time moving, funny and desperately bizarre. She is not merely a brilliant writer but a consummate, endlessly talented performer.
Arran’s talented singing group, Ain’t Misbehaving, provided the perfect setting for the evening with a polished, brilliantlyrhythmic rendering of a programme of jazz songs, and everyone had an extremely good time. David Underdown said in his words of thanks that we hoped this was not the last time we would see Jackie on Arran, and his wish was cheered to the rafters
The winner of the competition was Davnet Heery, for a moving poem called Diagnosis. Davnet is from Connemara in Ireland, but made the trip to Arran to receive her prize, and also to take part in the inspiring and brilliantly practical workshop that Jackie Kay ran the following morning.
