• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Association for Scottish Literature

Scottish Literature's International Voice

  • Home
  • News
  • About
    • ASL Council Members
    • Honorary Fellowships
  • Publications
    • Author submissions
    • Books
      • Annual Volumes
      • Free Publications
      • International Companions to Scottish Literature
      • New Writing Scotland
      • Occasional Papers
      • Scotnotes Study Guides
      • Other titles
    • Periodicals
      • Scottish Literary Review
      • Scottish Language
      • The Bottle Imp
    • Articles
    • Audio
  • Events
    • ASL Book Launches
    • ASL Conferences
    • ASL Lectures
  • Schools
    • Videos
      • Schools Conference: 2021
      • Schools Conference: 2020
      • Schools Conference: 2019
      • Schools Conference: 2018
      • Schools Conference: 2017
      • Schools Conference: 2016
      • Schools Conference: 2015
      • Schools Conference: 2014
      • Schools Conference: 2013
      • Strange Tales: Three Uncanny Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
      • Tally’s Blood
    • Free Publications
    • Schools Conference
    • Scotnotes Study Guides
    • Teaching Notes
    • Teaching Units
    • Voices of Scotland
  • Contact
    • Author Submissions
  • Join the ASL
Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 43

Scotnote 43

The Poetry and Drama of
Jackie Kay

Lorna Borrowman Smith

Published in: Paperback
By: Association for Scottish Literature, 2022
Price: £6.95
ISBN 9781906841492

Pre-order from our bookshop

Click here for the ASL Teaching Notes, including the National 5 Teaching Note for Six Poems by Jackie Kay, and here to watch Dorothy McMillan’s talk, ‘The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay’, along with other videos from the 2013 ASLS Schools Conference.


Jackie Kay served as Scotland’s Makar from 2016 to 2021 and is one of Scotland’s foremost writers. Much of her work explores her own life and heritage, her upbringing and the cultural forces which shaped her. Many of her poems illuminate the stuff of everyday existence, and commemorate the love of family and friends with great tenderness and humour. Often, too, her writing explores the lives of others, giving marginalised and persecuted individuals a voice and bearing witness to the consequences of the worst in human nature.

Lorna Borrowman Smith’s Scotnote Study Guide examines issues of family and cultural identities in Jackie Kay’s work. It covers a wide range of her poetry as well as her 2008 poetic drama The Lamplighter, and provides a comprehensive and stimulating guide for senior school pupils and teachers.

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

Footer

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Archives

ASL
Department of Scottish Literature
University of Glasgow
7 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QH
Scotland
Phone/Fax: +44 (0) 141 330 5309

© 2022 Association of Scottish Literature · Developed by TRWA ·