Jackie and Sapphire: Page 1 of 2

Story index:	Page 1: The review
	Page 2: Audio: the poems

Bloodaxe author Jackie Kay perfomed at this summer's Edinburgh International Book Festival. Our web site editor was there. Click on any poem title in red to download it as an MP3, or go to page 2 for all recordings in Wave (.wav) and MP3 formats, plus details.

Jackie Kay claims she is nervous. "It's nerve-wracking reading completely new stuff. You never know what people are going to do," she tells 200 people sitting in a large tent in Edinburgh's leafy Charlotte Square Gardens.

Kay has returned to her native Scotland to read her poetry at the Edinburgh Book Festival, alongside an old friend, the New York poet Sapphire.

Kay is clearly delighted to be here, just can't stop smiling. As the Herald's Pam Ordell introduces the two poets, they are whispering and smirking at each other like schoolchildren.

Later, while one is reading, the other will smile with recognition, mouth the lines along with her friend, or laugh at jokes the audience don't seem to notice.

Nervous? I don't believe a word of it.

As soon as Kay opens her mouth, the process of winning the audience over is pretty much complete. She has the Glaswegian gift of the gab. If you're not sure what that is, think of Billy Connolly.

Many of the audience are old fans of Jackie's, including Alan Taylor, former editor of the Scotsman, and Faith Liddell, former director of the Book Festival. Newcomers, like your sceptical and jaded reporter, leave as converts.

Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961, raised in Glasgow, and now lives in Manchester. She says she fictionalised her own life for her first collection, "The Adoption Papers", the story of a black girl adopted by a white Glaswegian couple. Published in 1991, it won three major awards.

In 1993 she won the Somerset Maugham award for "Other Lovers". Her most recent Bloodaxe book, "Off Colour" was short listed for the TS Eliot prize.

She starts her reading with "English cousin comes to Scotland", telling us "I didn't have any cousins when I was wee, and I used to imagine that even an English cousin would be better than none at all".

"The Waiting list" sees a prospective adoptive parent hiding the evidence of her politics when the agency visits her at home:

All the copies of the Daily Worker
I shoved under the sofa
the dove of peace I took down from the loo

"The Red Graveyard" is one of a series of poems celebrating blues singer Bessie Smith. This powerful poem imagines Bessie haunting the many abusive men with whom she had relationships, and then moves to contemplate memory, and the poet's own relationship with her parents.

Kay tells us how an evil-tempered Eartha Kitt turned up hung-over at the BBC studios in Edinburgh to record the Bessie Smith poems.

"I said 'It's good of you to come, Eartha', and she said 'I know'."

"She sent these nervous sound technicians out to get her some painkillers, and I said 'I've got some in my bag'. Eartha said 'Let 'em walk, the walk will do 'em goooood!'"

"I've been going through life trying to fashion the same attitude ever since."

Kay's infectious humour permeates her poetry, more than is obvious on the page. She reads the delightful "Ma Broon Visits a Therapist", convulsing her Scottish audience. There has never been a gentler or more mirthful feminism.

"Somebody Else" is Kay's shortest poem, and she compensates for this with another anecdote:

"I read in a school in Lancashire once, and the Home Economics teacher said to me 'D'ya know, I've heard you a lot on the radio, and in my mind you were tall and slender. Just shows you what the radio can do don't it.'

"Then she said 'Never mind, your voice is Highland water goin' over stones'."

Sapphire's poetry is very different. Wearing black leather, she is tall and angular, her head clean-shaven. Her rhythm and pace make you think of beat poetry - she was tutored by Allen Ginsberg.

She reads from her collection "Black Wings and Blind Angels", poems full of anger and sadness. "Different Kind of Books" is about the resilience of a Puerto-Rican student made HIV positive by her husband.

As American as credit cards and cancer

"I don't know if this is a poem or a rant" she says, reading a long, harrowing poem in the voices of John Lennon's killer Mark Chapman, and Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin:

I fantasised something as American
as credit cards and cancer
I fantasised killing the famous

And now Jackie Kay reads the new material she was nervous about, a short story called "Why don't you just stop talking?" She needn't have worried - it goes down a storm