Jackie Kay's Monumental Poetics

As sculpted by Michael Snowden, Jackie Kay is one of only three named public sculptures or statues of women of African descent in the UK. This chapter centralises a distinctive dimension of Kay’s work, that which connects with public commemorative culture alongside her revisionary engagements with canonised poetic histories and aesthetic techniques. I employ my critical model ‘Landmark Poetics’ to consider Kay’s poems that are inscribed upon material surfaces other than paper – especially those that have a dedicatory function: the Brontë stone, ‘Anne’ , located between Thornton and Haworth in Yorkshire, and ‘Queensferry Crossing’, set into Gordon Muir’s bronze sculpture ‘Bridge of Pages’ on the Forth Road Bridge, one of only a few braille Landmark Poems in the world. In considering Kay’s Black Ekphrasis techniques in her homage to Fanny Eaton’s portrait, the chapter turns to Kay’s Had We Never poems at the core of the Black Burns and The Slave's Lament by Graham Fagen/Douglas Gordon/Jackie Kay. Kay’s positioning of a Black diasporic poetic consciousness at the book’s centre offers a subtle subversiveness in her refutation of gendered and racialised tropes which developed throughout imperial representational history.