The Scottish poet and writer Jackie Kay is listening to Jazz Record Requests on the radio when I arrive at her home in Manchester, where she has lived for many years. She was startled recently to hear her own name on the show, when a listener asked for a song by Bessie Smith after reading Kay’s biography of the blues legend. “I grew up in a house filled with jazz,” she says, reaching for her mother’s best teacups – there are macaroons and biscuits on the table. Her parents loved to riff off each other in song: “What a day it has been,” would lead to “What a difference a day makes.”
“Writers often write to grapple with the presence that absence makes,” Kay once said, and two huge absences are at the heart of her latest collection, May Day, her first since the end of her stint as Makar (the poet laureate of Scotland) three years ago. Her parents, Helen and John Kay, Glaswegian communists who adopted Kay as a baby, died within a year and two months of each other: her father at the end of 2019; her mother at the start of 2021. “I had a real awareness that they were kindred souls to me,” she says. Talking about them in the past tense is still painful. “Everybody hesitates around it, like a swimming pool before you dive into the water and you know it’s freezing cold. Sometimes you just forget it, or you muddle the tenses. We should invent a tense that hovers midway.”
