It Was Never About the Kingfisher

This is a vibrant collection of the home – of kitchens, bedrooms, picture hooks, homewreckers and housewives. But there is nothing cosy here, as the poems impart stark feelings of emptiness – the evening is a ‘blank page’, a pine dining table is ‘bare as a coffin’ and death is an ‘empty plate’. Here Kay doubles down, deftly ring-fencing her reader with images of boundary and separation: curtains are shut ‘tight as secrets’, a coastline is marked by ‘gnashing rocks’, and even ‘names are borders’. And yet – with a kind of alchemy – Kay manages to use such images of emptiness and isolation to also sing of hope and joy. It Was Never About the Kingfisher is not a book of one shade, but multihued and prismatic; each poem, like the titular kingfisher, is a small swift moment of iridescence.

Mark Pajak

Universal themes of aging and mortality are given a fresh, absorbing makeover in this exciting collection. Helen Kay has a way of unsettling and fascinating the reader at the same time, often in the same line. She has an eye for domestic pathos and a way of making life’s mundanities fizz with vitality. Even melancholic observations are served up with a wry smile and lip-smacking originality. In one poem, a loud but harmless drunk unnerves his fellow train passengers, who are ‘boxed up / like matches, some unlit, others spent / judgment smouldering in their eyes.’ The poems are underpinned by a breezy philosophy which feels genuine and unforced: ‘The thrill is that new things still happen.’

Ian Humphreys

These poems look at the world from a different angle, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary and beautiful. The background of our lives – home and garden, and the domestic work that goes on there - is brought into focus and illuminated. Mundane chores such as doing the laundry are elevated through rich language, moments are observed with poignancy and humour. Surprising metaphors and similes offer a fresh perspective - from the ‘bra gymnasts’ on the washing line, to the hens, ‘five/muffins self-raising into each other.’ Navigating a path through love and loss, ecological themes, remedies and cures for illness, these unique poems explore the idea that ‘new things still happen’. A tender and insightful collection, full of optimism and delight, celebrating what it means to be human.

Sally Baker

New energies spark: A review of It Was Never About The Kingfisher by Helen Kay

by Christopher James

There’s much to admire in Helen Kay’s accomplished, playful and moving collection, It Was Never About the Kingfisher. Like the enigmatic, mercurial bird missing in its title, it defies easy categorisation. Everyday life is transformed through the prism of Helen’s poetry into something strange and often wondrous. The mundane can become unexpectedly beautiful. There’s a determination to eschew the easy poetic image and delve deeper to find a different, perhaps truer kind of beauty.

One of the most moving pieces here is Scrabble, recounting the poet and her father’s evening ritual: ‘Every night Dad and I clicked the tiles slick/as casino chips.’ With ‘Mum, out cold,’ upstairs, this was their way negotiating a way through, as well as bridging the distance between father and daughter. She explains: ‘Winning/did not matter; it was our way of talking.’ Throughout this collection, language itself is a balm against the confusion, boredom and disappointment of the world. The poem is densely woven, the linked imagery binding it together, just as ‘My pen knitted/Lines of scores, filling the evening’s blank page.’

So many of the poems are filled with seemingly mundane, often grubby, domestic detail – cigarette stubs, ‘claggy tea’ or ‘half a melon in the fridge.’ While not typical poetic fare, Kay transforms these details into something other, like ‘a bleached/coral reef of uncooked stripe.’

She is at her best as an observer, seeing the unusual in the ordinary. In ‘Her joiners,’ she imagines that these tradesmen ‘grow in pubs.’ She watches as they ‘stub their fingers with hammers/letting beery blood mark out their lines.’ This poem has a strange dance all of its own, arranged in its light-footed quatrains. There’s a sly wit at work here too – ampersands (‘&s’) are sprinkled throughout, increasing in number as the poem and the men’s work progresses, joining together the sentences and eventually the poem itself, in the same way her subjects carry out their own work. Her metaphors illuminate the dark corners of the house; the joiners ‘know all the pipes & wires, the veins/of her home.’

The poet seems to acknowledge that much of the world is ugly, rough edged, and unpoetic. That’s the starting point for Love Poem, which begins abruptly: ‘Your ringtone woke me early.’ The call brings not greetings, but a brutal anecdote: ‘You rang to say… How a young male sparrowhawk shot/Up the river to where the blackbird sang,/Killed it, let it thud on the grass.’

There’s an echo of Ted Hughes in this violent, vignette; of brutality as well as beauty in nature. Meanwhile the skilful use of vowel sounds is redolent of Heaney. The long, openness of ‘sang’ is curtailed with the abrupt, unequivocal ‘thud.’

All of Helen’s poems follow their own logic and adhere closely to the rules dictated by their theme. Charge Nurse is a superbly executed case in point. It begins with one of the collections best images: ‘She weaves through a diamond mine/of London lights to park in her own space./Her car gasps to be hooked to its drip.’

Medical language is laced through the poem: the car is a ‘capsule.’ Returning home, as her front door opens, it ‘feeds her a tube of light.’ Yet there’s another parallel theme that also run through the poem – the electricity and energy implied by ‘charge’ of her title. On the one hand it’s a pure word game, punning on ‘charge.’ Yet Kay uses this conceit to convey then energies of the city, and the nurse’s own life force, showing the interconnectedness of things; between the planet and ourselves, and between people: ‘as she has earthed the shocks of the sick.’

Just like in Kay’s own poetry: ‘New energies spark.’ There’s even a third level – the latent energy in language itself: The car ‘is left to charge – the word conducts/meaning from Latin, carrus, cart.’ This is clever, engaging stuff.

Cemetery Dog Walk shows the same deft handling and thoughtful use of form. The poem is arranged like a series of graves. The headstones are ‘lichen bearded’ but the poem leaves little room for reverence, especially when the dog ‘cocks/its profanely balletic leg.’ The timing is impeccable, and the mix of humour, darkness and familiarity is intoxicating.

It Was Never About The Kingfisher has just been shortlisted for the International Rubery Award, and it’s easy to see why. Helen Kay is operating at an incredible high level, fully alive to all of life’s possibilities, while being acutely aware of its pitfalls and disappointments too. This collection isn’t one of them.