Poem about grief named one of the best of past year

A poem by Jackie Kay about the “complicated grief ” she felt at the death of her birth mother has been named as one of the best published last year.

The Scottish poet laureate’s work Margaret’s Moon, in which she examines her reaction to the death of the woman who gave her up for adoption, is one of 20 on the Scottish Poetry Library’s best of 2017 list.

The anthology, published online today, is drawn from poems written by Scots or by poets based north of the Border and is edited by Roddy Woomble, frontman of the band Idlewild.

Kay writes that after her birth mother’s death the sky “had the most beautiful of all sunsets”, but that she had left life “half-written, half unsaid”.

Kay was adopted by a white communist couple as a baby and brought up in Glasgow.

In her award-winning memoir Red Dust Road, she described her search for her birth parents, who were a Nigerian student and a young nurse from the Highlands.

Speaking in 2016, Kay said she had attended her birth mother’s funeral and had read a poem, but that she was not introduced to people as her daughter, which felt “quite strange”.