Why Jackie Kay is one of the most vibrant poets today

She published her poems with small presses in the 1960s and 1970s, including Indenti-Kit (1967), Language-Games (1971) and, posthumously, On the Periphery (1976). Her critical and theoretical writing also appeared posthumously as Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (1978).

Forrest-Thomson was championed by Edwin Morgan, who wrote a moving elegiac sequence in her memory, “Unfinished Poems” in his collection The New Divan (1977).

Morgan noted that her poems are “shot through with a raw, moving, almost ballad strain” and in that brief comment incisively connects her precisely worded, intellectually acute, self-consciously literary poems with the deep tradition in which impersonal facts and immediacy of personal implication are in close, and sometimes dangerous, connection.

Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations brings together her fierce intellectual passion with refreshingly clinical engagement in the sharpest of focal concentrations on the purpose, dynamics and artifice of language in poetry. For example, in “Alka-Seltzer Poem”, witty, comic, everyday things and events acquire an acute poignancy when connected to literary tradition, as with the quotation from Keats in the opening line, and to the sense that something personal is at stake here: “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim / the effervescence is subsiding.”

Her elegy, “In Memoriam Ezra Pound” manages to evoke the authority of Pound’s imperial and vatic pronouncements, undercut it with sharp personal feeling, and qualify it with allusions to other modern poets and barely remembered references.

The ballad-like poems “I have a little hour-glass” and “I have a little nut-tree” might seem whimsical in their lightness, but they are packed with understated qualities of pain. The nut-tree bears only anguish and a tear, which is all the fruit she can promise to give in return for a kiss.

These poems are immediately touching and effective. “Cordelia or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean, But Be’” is equally moving but manages also to be almost a scholarly essay on Shakespeare, literature and literary study, and the fleeting fact of mortal humanity. Forrest-Thomson’s poems are of a rare kind: highly intellectual, emotionally piercing, fully charged and direct yet often allusive and sometimes obscure work. Their challenge is lasting.

Andrew Greig (b.1951) established his reputation as an iconoclastic but highly sensitised poet with Men On Ice (1977), in which three climbers are found on a mountain’s ice-face: Grimpeur (meditative philosopher), Axe-man (down-to-earth rock musician), and Poet (recording the journey and its speculative interludes). Each of them is aware of a fourth presence accompanying their trek in the high altitudes.

This is a mock-epic, drawing stylistically and tonally from American Beat and Black Mountain poets of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Edward Dorn, whose long poem Gunslinger is an important precedent and from which Greig quotes. An index acknowledges other quotations or echoes from Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan but cheekily notes that there is “positively no mention of’ Zola, Freud, Marx, Stalin or Hugh MacDiarmid”.

Like Liz Lochhead and Forrest-Thomson, Greig took his primary bearings from English-language American poets rather than Scots-language ballads or Scottish poetry in traditional metres. In a note written for a National Book League pamphlet, Greig said that he saw himself “as much a child of the sixties’ international culture as of Scotland”.

He consolidated his reputation in further volumes such as Surviving Passages (1982) and The Order of the Day (1990), in which lyrical or discursive poems elaborate the themes of climbing, the challenge and the arduous journey, which, while taking their premise from actual mountaineering expeditions, make use of appropriate imagery in depictions of domestic or romantic circumstance.

WESTERN Swing (1994) returns to the characters, style and tones of Men On Ice, but moves the ethos on from the mid-1970s to the 1990s: we travel from Glencoe and East Fife to Katmandu and Marrakesh but matters of judgement impose themselves on local and domestic references. After serious illness, Into You (2001) marked a recovery and affirmation, and a greater reliance upon specific locations in Scotland, named and commemorated, unsentimentally, tentatively and with an increasingly fragile sense of mortality.

An important gathering of Greig’s work appeared in This Life, This Life: Selected Poems 1970-2006 (2006), and As Though We Were Flying (2011) saw a maturity of recognition in poems of loss and resilience, celebrations and elegies. It was followed by another almost-narrative poem set in and around the Orkney Islands, Found at Sea: The Expanded Log of the “Arctic Whaler” (2013), which was adapted into a play by David Greig.

Meg Bateman (b.1959), writing in Gaelic and translating her poems into English, published memorable work in Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile / Lightness and other Poems (1997), Soirbheas / Fair Wind (2007) and Transparencies (2013). Bateman’s poetry returns again and again to the central theme of love, the exhilarations and deep delights that come with its presence, the despair and hard recognitions that come with its loss.

As a scholar of the Gaelic tradition, she is highly self-conscious of her location in the company of Gaelic poets – emphatically, both women and men – who have addressed the same theme but this has never inhibited the spontaneity, immediacy and effectiveness of her writing. Its qualities of emotional speed, deft structuring, gentle but sharp implication and understatement are uniquely balanced and sustained.

Perhaps because Gaelic was not her first language, and she learned it both as a poet and a scholar (she has taught at the Gaelic College in Skye and co-edited and annotated major anthologies of traditional Gaelic poetry), she is particularly attentive to the linguistic energies at work in her English-language translations of her own Gaelic poems. These have a musicality of their own, partly delivered through restraint and poise, partly through techniques like refrain and repetition.

The four-stanza poem “Because I was so fond of him” uses the title as a recurring last line in each of its three-line stanzas to haunting effect, as fondness and closeness give way to loneliness and hard recognition. Bateman draws on the song tradition in a literary way, engaging in the artifice of literary art while carefully evoking song’s lyrical lightness of touch. The first collection, Lightness, is characterised by these qualities of intimacy and openness, surrender and self-contained self-determination.

With Fair Wind, there are different kinds of paradox in the forms of the poems, some metrically regular, some in free verse, balancing the physical sense of the pleasures of the life of the body with a darker understanding of their ephemerality, especially when measured against the more lasting, but less immediately fulfilling qualities of art, whether in literature or song. Transparencies takes in an expanding range of reference, to Japan, Estonia, singers and dancers from far beyond Scotland, but remains centred in personal understandings and sympathies enacted in the Gaelic world, over generations and with a convincing, patient, tough, self-confident but humble maturity everywhere evident.

In 2016, the Scottish Government appointed Jackie Kay (b.1961) as Scots Makar – or national poet laureate – following Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. As we’ve seen, there were many fine poets among her contemporaries, but for many, this was a much wished-for and happy choice. Her first book, The Adoption Papers (1991), was an autobiographical sequence depicting the child of a Scotswoman and a Nigerian man being adopted and welcomed into the home of a kindly, loving, staunchly communist couple living near Glasgow. Different voices and a range of characters – the daughter, the adoptive mother and the birth mother – speak of their experience. Tough as it is at times, the humanity of the story never palls or falters.

KAY grew up in Glasgow, discovering her gay sexuality and later travelling to Africa to meet her birth father. In her writing, she speculates on such ostensibly problematic yet liberating aspects of identity as belonging, love and political desire. The themes of family, local, national and ancestral identity and questions of sexuality and social prejudice run through all her work. All this might seem serious and maybe even sensational, outwardly focused and explicit, and in her poems, plays, in her writing for children, in her short stories and the novel, Trumpet, she can be exactly that.

“The Maw Broon Monologues” were a comedy blast, loaded with satiric intent. Yet the subtlety of her versification, the nuanced deployment of individual voices and tones, the tensions and sympathies between characters realised through speech recorded in verse, are all carried along on a sustaining sense of good humour, humanistic sympathy and sheer eloquence.

Her further books – Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Life Mask (2005), Darling (2007), Fiere (2011), Reality, Reality (2012) and Bantam (2017) – take her in all sorts of directions: public and personal, exploring politics and language, different generations, geography and history, motherhood, falling in love, racism, prejudice, pride, popular culture and Shakespeare, Scotland and Africa. As Hugh MacDiarmid once said, “If there is ocht in Scotland that’s worth hae’in’ / There is nae distance to which it’s unattached.”