Jackie Kay

If it’s an uncomfortable topic, Jackie Kay can make it sound beautiful. She builds up her poems with meters almost like music, only to make the twist at the end more dramatic. Her heritage and orphan past are incorporated in her work – they are personal experiences but Kay describes her images so well, it’s universal. She’s the speaker and uses her feelings and experiences to teach lessons on acceptance and pain.
“Even the Trees” is a stanzaic poem made up of non-rhyming couplets. The steady flow is juxtaposed with the topic because the poem is about slavery. More specifically, the personification of trees to imply that slavery was a crime against nature. One important characteristic to note is that this poem is written in present tense. Slavery was abolished in 1865 (in the U.S.),
It’s what they represent that makes his shoes unique – the idea that the moral become immortal through shoes. “Gifts from the comrades’ sad red widows. / My father would never see a good shoe go to waste.” This isn’t total disregard or lack of respect for the red widow, but the father is caring on a legacy. That legacy was their communist group. The pattern in the second stanza, “good brown leather, black leather, leather soles. Doesn’t matter if they are a size too big, small” shows how many times the shoes have been altered. The refrain of the line, “On my father’s feet are the shoes of dead comrades” is creating rhythm and it implies that there are so many shoes that the list can go on and on, just like that phrase. The repetition is what’s keeping the memory of the dead comrades alive. Just like the shoes, if her father keeps wearing them and Kay keeps repeating the line, their legacy will live on. It’s also like a cycle. Her father will one day join his comrades and his shoes will be passed on – someone else will get to say, “On my father’s feet are the shoes of dead