Off Colour

These poems explore illness, sickness and health, past and present, in a dynamic and original way. They examine not just the sick body, but the sick mind, the sick society, the sickness of racism and prejudice. Here are fresh voices, black people from Britain’s past, the voice of a dying Sunday, the voice of a woman dying at the hands of the immigration authorities. The book grapples with obsessions: teeth, death, sex, colour, health. It is a book for our troubled times, both strange and funny. A virus runs through the book, attacking other poems. The finger is on the pulse in Off Colour. Off Colour is now out of print but all the poems in the collection are included in Darling (2007).

About the Author :
Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, adapted for both radio and stage, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, was followed by Fiere (Picador, 2011), The Empathetic Store (Mariscat Press, 2015) and Bantam (Picador, 2017). Jackie Kay's fiction and non-fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998), three collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and Reality, Reality (2012), and her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and co-edited the anthologies Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2012) with James Procter and Gemma Robinson, and The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Carolyn Forché. In 2014 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Salford, and in 2016 she was named as the new Makar, National Poet of Scotland. She lives in Manchester, and has been awarded an MBE and an OBE for services to literature.

Review :
Jackie Kay’s third collection is an angrier, more humorous landscape… disease is her metaphor for social cruelty, especially racism…Kay, a black Scot adopted by white Communists and a prize-winning novelist, has always linked her poems strongly. The linking principle in Off Colour is identity, bizarrely intertwined (as in detective stories’ identification of a corpse) with dentistry…witty, risky, lyrical, teasing; rich, strong, socially questioning. Cleverness at the service of feeling…putting vulnerability, both emotional and physical, squarely on the line.