Why Don't You Stop Talking. Jackie Kay. Picador. UK £15.99 hb

reviewed by Pat Boran

A reader coming for the first time to the work of Jackie Kay might well guess that she's also an accomplished poet. The crispness, tightness and playful sense of humour of the best of her poems is also evident in the baker's dozen of stories that make up this book. Like the man in the opening tale who, on the brink of retirement, suddenly and inexplicably finds himself obsessed with sharks, many of Kay's characters manifest symptoms of things which are so deeply embedded in them as to be otherwise invisible or unknown.

The female narrator of Making Movies begins her tale: "Opening credits. My enemy makes movies. She is tall with a sharp nose," and then goes on to dissect her lover-enemy, apparently unaware that her story, her version of events, is a kind of mini-movie in itself.

Things find their way to the surface, often in unexpected and amusing ways, with the result that Kay's characters often suddenly see themselves as if for the first time.

The Oldest Woman in Scotland becomes something of a national treasure, complete with plaque outside her house, but with all the attention she now gets she can't understand why nobody ever listened to her when she was younger.

The two female teachers, known only as Physics and Chemistry, live together in an intimate relationship, but never speak of it, living a kind of pleasant if institutional life even away from school. The discovery of their love, however, and their subsequent dismissal from the school, though it surprises even them, sets them free to reinvent themselves as the proprietors of a small wool shop where "Plain did the accounts, the opening and closing, the labelling. Purl did the selling, the smiling, the recommending, the ordering." All is changed on the surface, but the love survives.

The Day You Change is the name of one of the sub-sections of one of Kay's best known poems, Other Lovers, and it is this title that perhaps best describes the heart of these short and witty pieces. Kay's championing of difference, of otherness, is never preachy and, if some of the stories seem a little slight, the strength of this book is its lightness of touch.

© copyright Pat Boran