A Son of the Rock

Poems by Jackie Kay illustrated by Rob Ryan Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2019, 94 p. First published 2009.

Quite why this volume of poetry comes under the imprint of a children’s publisher is slightly mystifying. I would say that the poems it contains are not particularly restricted to a child audience. Lines like, “Time is a loop stitch. I knit to keep death away,” would certainly indicate as much. However, grandmothers and knitting are recurrent subjects.

Some of the more memorable poems came towards the end of the book.

Great-Grandmother’s Lament contrasts the present-day childhood engagement with screens to what occurred in the past. Shetland is a love poem to that archipelago and includes sly allusions to lines from popular songs. Like its title, The Nine Lives of the Cat Mandu riffs, punningly or otherwise, on the word ‘cat’ or proverbs/phrases involving either it or the three letters it contains in their order. First and Foremost does something similar for ‘first’. Double Trouble uses opposites to make its point. Sour Sixteen embodies the passage of a child’s life to that age in terms of how quickly those years pass for a parent. First X compares voting for the first time, with thanks to the suffragettes, to a first kiss, x.