Fiere

by Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay’s new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road , the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland birth-parents; but it is also a moving book in its own right, and a deep enquiry into all forms of human friendship. Fiere – Scots for ‘companion, friend, equal’ – is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and of how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors – as well as all the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made. Written with Kay’s trademark wit and flair, and infused with both Scots and Igbo speech, it is also a fascinating account of the formation of a self-identity – and the discovery of a tongue that best honours it. Musical and moving, funny and profound, Fiere is Jackie Kay’s most accomplished, assured and ambitious collection of poems to date.

Genres: Poetry, Scotland

80 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 2010

About the author

Born in Glasgow in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Kay was adopted by a white couple, Helen and John Kay, as a baby. Brought up in Bishopbriggs, a Glasgow suburb, she has an older adopted brother, Maxwell as well as siblings by her adoptive parents.

Kay's adoptive father worked full-time for the Communist Party and stood for election as a Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the secretary of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Initially harbouring ambitions to be an actress, she decided to concentrate on writing after encouragement by Alasdair Gray. She studied English at the University of Stirling and her first book of poetry, the partially autobiographical The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991, and won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. Her other awards include the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, and the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, based on the life of American jazz musician Billy Tipton, born Dorothy Tipton, who lived as a man for the last fifty years of her life.

Kay writes extensively stage, screen, and for children. In 2010 she published Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her birth parents, a white Scottish woman, and a Nigerian man. Her birth parents met when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. Her drama The Lamplighter is an exploration of the Atlantic slave trade. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2007 and published in poem form in 2008.

Jackie Kay became a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) on 17 June 2006. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Kay lives in Manchester.



Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. THE ADOPTION PAPERS (Bloodaxe, 1991) won the Forward Prize, a Saltire prize and a Scottish Arts Council Prize. DARLING was a poetry book society choice. FIERE, her most recent collection of poems was shortlisted for the COSTA award. Her novel TRUMPET won the Guardian Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the IMPAC award. RED DUST ROAD, (Picador) won the Scottish Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the JR ACKERLEY prize and the LONDON BOOK AWARD. She was awarded an MBE in 2006, and made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. Her book of stories WISH I WAS HERE won the Decibel British Book Award.
She also writes for children and her book RED CHERRY RED (Bloomsbury) won the CLYPE award. She has written extensively for stage and television. Her play MANCHESTER LINES produced by Manchester Library Theatre was on this year in Manchester. Her new book of short stories REALITY, REALITY was recently published by Picador. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Reviews

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful sharp and light. Goodness and love to torment a Caliban: wonderful. In these poems the woman, the poet, the human is there, a fiere, companion, friend. Unsullied, unworried by self, she gives and takes in joy, passes through others as they, as we, pass through her. A person - her or us - delighting in routes and roots, vitally sensitive to accident and circumstance, meetings, pains: she, we, losing our way in the woods, alone and dead, being found by the friend, and our finding the lost friend equally. Motifs of life and death, as losing the spark as well as losing our loved ones, always finding resolution, joy after numbing, swirling time that's fast and slow at once. And walking always with a twin, both clarified as in Longitude and Twins (the latter after Alice Neel's painting), and towards the ineffable sense of belonging not only to another but to life itself, perhaps the fullest meaning of love.

Companion to Red Dust Road, the search for biological parents, dissolving place by evoking difference - Glasgow, the elephant grass of Nigeria - always growing, in love, so her lover loves her to bits and in return I love ye tae hale: hale, hearty, whole, healthful. Love poems to friends, son, lover, adoptive parents, Dad and Mum both wonderfully, lovingly let to wander at ease in her mind, never dead. Poems that bring paintings, figurines and statues to life, not a single cleverness used, just the image itself. Always, always letting the sound of words, her Ibo, her native Scots tongues, mix, flow or stand separate (like the black river that does not mix with the blue lake), bring us music: Kamso Ozumba/ We'll put some whisky in the silver quaich/ and bless your fine and handsome face. Slainte mhath!

The quite remarkable Impromptu is a formal gem, a tribute to music's power, jazz building, calling up the great Blue Notes, the poem's turning a piano to a heron to sky, turning sounds to light to revelation that spirit will not, cannot die:They will be alive, as they've always been,/Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone.

Very light trills of Burns throughout, more explicitly in Bronze Head from Ife, and tender evocation of Edwin Morgan in Strawberry Meringue: visiting him at 90, he ...asked after my son, and Carol Ann./ Love, you said, Ah love wistfully/If you can be friends you're doing not bad.

Playful, mischievous with MacDiarmid (A Drunk Woman Looks at Her Nipple), she will take his poetry as starting point, as she does paintings and other objects, as in Brockit (which, I think, resonates with MacDiarmid's The Bonnie Broukit Bairn).

This is a collection of poems upon which to find out something of who you are.

ka udo di, ka ndu di

[Bookish Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection of poems: poems which feel earthy and raw, nostalgic and whip smart, still soft around the edges, not too ambitious - just honest. I'd only distantly heard of Jackie Kay before I stumbled on this book earlier today and devoured it on one bus journey home. I didn't expect it to be this touching.

The best poetry is the poetry that speaks to us and effects us emotionally. Athough I have no experience of being half Nigerian and half Scottish and no real knowledge of the Scottish dialect which so poignantly litters this work with Kay's own history - I felt this poetry's yearning for identity and home.

I especially love what she writes about her mother and father, about the people that enrich and complicate her life. This book is beautiful.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite poems from this collection:
-Between the Dee and the Don
-Fiere in the Middle
-Dark African Wood
-Road to Amaudo
-Bronze Head from Ife

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The language (incorporating Scots and Igbo) perfectly reflects the poet’s own mixed identity: half Scottish and half Nigerian, she was adopted by white parents in Glasgow. As an Igbo saying she quotes has it, “The middle ground is the best place to be.” These poems illuminate love, motherhood and family memories.

[Iona Sharma]

I really wanted to like this more than I did. Kay is a half-white, half-Nigerian poet and a prominent lesbian poet as well as the Scots Makar, and I was delighted to hear that part of this collection is in Scots; I was very keen to see that background of identity synthesised in the language. And there is good stuff here - I liked "Fiere", the title poem, "Black River", which resonates for me with Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and "Ukpor Market" is brutal - but somehow it never quite came together for me.

[Clara B · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite, always.

[MGS]

A wonderful collection.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a fantastic collection of poetry, which I've put down and re-read already and will go back to again. I particularly liked her poems in Scots, and those reflecting on her trip to Africa tracing her father. Also contains a lovely poem marking a marriage which I wish I'd come across 2 weeks earlier for a friend's wedding. Ah well.

[Rachel Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning. Can't wait to read her other collections.

[J.C. Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this collection. I love Kay's use of Scottish dialect and Igbo words and sudden rhyme.

[Eddie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess my main issue of this collection is the idea that identity has to come from your race or your mixture thereof. Your identity is so much more than just your unchangable attributes, in Jackie's case her race; her gender; her sexuality, and for her to limit her poems too such a narrow defintion of identity is disappointing. I've watched interviews of hers and she seems like a lovely person but I just don't feel that change in perspective, that deep understanding that should come from poetry. Yeah she's half scottish half nigerian, that's the same before she wrote the collection and the same after, it's not her defining characteristic. I haven't read any of her other work so maybe she tackles some other subject areas but from what I've seen she doesn't, it's a shame she can be very skilled poet in all but subject.

[DS Coremans · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is not a single poem in this entire short collection that is not outstanding. Kay’s powerful use of multiple languages to craft her collection; and her seamless transition from Scots, to English, and back again while being inclusive of African roots and cultures make ‘Fiere’ transcend the boundaries of nationality, race, gender and time.

These poems are deeply personal and yet inherently relatable; they inspire memory and absolve that which we have forgotten.

I very much look forward to reading more by Jackie Kay and highly recommend her work.

DSC
www.fodibyli.com
#FoDiByLi

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book of poetry up off the library shelf at random, and I absolutely loved it. Jackie Kay has a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and her poems address so much of those two cultures coming together - some in thick Scots dialect, some full of Nigerian words, all full of beauty and this sense of seeing all the different parts of her life with great affection, even the struggles. Some of these poems have become good friends that stayed once I returned the book to the library...

[noku zhou · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think this collection was really for me. I didn’t really connect with it or read any poem I was particularly obsessed with. Although, “Muse” and “Fiere in the Middle” are great poems.

I don’t think I adore super simple poetry, which is weird because simplicity is supposed to be beautiful. However saying that this collection probably used a ton of literary technique that I just couldn’t be bothered to look for.

[scarlettraces · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

From the acknowledgements, some of these were commissioned which I think, along with the ones that rhyme (poetry shouldn't rhyme) accounts for why I didn't take as much of a shine as expected to this collection.

[Brianne Haddow · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the first poem in the book but wasn't much a fan of the rest. It was lovely and refreshing that some of them were written in Scots. Admittedly though, I had to read this for uni and I'm not someone who is known for appreciating poetry!

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sensitive and humane volume that combines many tongues to catch the "fiere" of life: the flame of poetical communication that rivals Pentecostal speech.

[Arwa F. Al-M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful merging of the Scottish and Nigerian influences that make up the narrator's identity. I advise reading it as an addendum to Kay's autobiography Red Dust Road

[Zozo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems I enjoyed most are: Muse, Valentine, and Impromptu.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

so tender and soft

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Day 22 of the Sealey Challenge.

[Chelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The Scottish diction in many poems warmed my heart, the theme of ‘friend’ (fiere) was beautiful. Will be reading more of Jackie Kay for sure!

[cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5☆

[Sajgonkawarzywna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection of poems

⭐4/5

[Miller Kress · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scottish-Nigerian author. Makar of Scotland. Great poet.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems have a beautiful musicality, and I found Kay's explorations of family heritage very moving. The Scots dialect might be challenging for some, but she does provide a glossary. I have some prior exposure and love Scots, so I didn't find it problematic at all.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection - not my favourite of Kay's, but impressive nonetheless.

[SallyandBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd seen this book in Smiths in the sale section but was never sure I'd like it. But today it was reduced yet again and just to £1 so I took the chance and bought it.

I started and read a few pages and suddenly it started to blow my mind. A little hard to read if your not in tune to Scottish speech/language. But lo and behold she has an index of all the Scottish words at the back that the reader might not know and I found this extremely helpful. I also found reading it out loud made the poems seem even more beautiful.
Why I didn't get this earlier when I first saw it I do not know.

I read it in one sitting over teatime to bedtime and will definitely read it again soon. I'm now going to look for more to read by Jackie Kay.

[Shriram · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a good read for anyone exploring the many realms of poetry. Some of the poems are vivid, some are poignant, while some explore themselves.

Despite some cliches, this collection is worth trying. I would recommend it for beginners of poetry.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, poetry. Again, I'll tell you my favourite in a bit.