Darling

April 15, 2008
Identity in the former British Empire is less fluid than here, so when an unmarried Scottish woman gives birth to a child with a Nigerian father, the child is considered black. Adopted by a childless couple of radical politics, Kay grew up with higher awareness of the complexities of racial and cultural identity than perhaps any other prominent poet from her island possesses. Her earliest book, excerpted here, is the stunningly well-wrought verse play The Adoption Papers (1992), whose most endearing scene shows her adoptive mother, a Communist, hiding Marx but leaving out the bust of Bobbie Burns. Like her great Scottish forebear, Kay is a poet of the common person, who in this multicultural age on the British isle is more likely to be a mixed-race woman than a lusty, populist white male. Kays work doesnt stop with autobiography; her later poems embrace other marginalized people in stories of homeless teens and rejected queens, of the aged and the dying. Her grand, embracing spirit should be better known in the U.S.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)