RESULTS

Humour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay's part of the equation. 'Darling' brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, 'The Adoption Papers', 'Other Lovers', 'Off Colour' and 'Life Mask', as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay's poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, 'Why Don't You Stop Talking', could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.

Jackie Kay's Life Mask is about love, loss, secrets and mistaken identity. These searching poems reveal the many ways people hide from each other and from themselves. They show how appearances are deceptive, and how many faces we make up in one face. Unpeeling the mask, she confronts her own past and her fears: meeting her father for the first time in Nigeria and ending a long-term relationship. Masks are about masquerade, camouflage, trickery, hypocrisy and stealth. They connect with running away, with how we conceal our feelings and hide from the truth.

Kay explores the qualities of love in a variety of relationships, moving from the familiar - parent, child, lover - to the extraordinary, including a sequence on Bessie Smith.

Jackie's latest collection of poetry is full of the dramatic power associated with her work, and plenty of music too. She explores the theme of identity in poems about an older generation, especially grandmothers, about the old days and the new days, and places the poet associates with these people, who live dreamlike, isolated existences, geographically, but also in the memory. Nature and the elements play a big role too: trees, the moon, the sea, fire. Jackie's style is both muscular and lyrical - one moment witty, the next melancholic, or gently surreal - and in this brilliant new collection, her poems are infused with warmth and colour: in particular, the colour Red.

Joss Moody has died and the jazz world is in mourning. But in death, Joss can no longer guard the secret he kept all his life, and Colman, his son, must confront the truth: the man he believed to be his father was, in fact, a woman. This is the poignant tale of a family facing loss, identity and love.

Love - in Wish I Was Here, Jackie Kay explores every facet of this most overwhelming and complicated of human emotions. In her distinctive voice, simultaneously fierce and delicate, she exposes the moments of tenderness, of shock, of bravery and stupidity that accompany the search for love, the discovery of love and, most of all, love's loss. Every story here resonates with bittersweet lucidity. Fearlessly scrutinizing her characters at their moments of greatest vulnerability, Kay brings the chaotic experience of love - and of simply living - into crystalline focus.