Wednesday 8 February 2012

Fiere by Jackie Kay


1)      Fiere was written as a companion piece or counterpart to Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road, do you think you needed to know this? Did it work as a stand-alone collection?
2)      Many of the poems in the collection are about her experiences of finding her birth parents – did you feel any emotional connection with the writer and her quest?
3)      The two major themes of this collection are friendship and connectedness – how did you feel that the author handled these themes? Did you feel any sense of recognition or affinity to the poems and the way that these subjects were addressed? Did these poems ring true?
4)      What was your overall impression of the collection as a whole? Did you like/dislike it? Why?
5)      Did you understand the Scot’s dialect used in some of the poems?
6)      Did you use the glossary at the back of the book whilst reading or look at it afterwards? Did using the glossary effect your enjoyment of the book? Would you have preferred these definitions as footnotes?
7)      What do you think was the reason for putting the glossary at the back?
8)      What did you think of Kay’s use of rhyme? Did you notice it?
9)      Did you notice any particular use of poetic forms?
10)  What was your opinion of the Fiere sequence? Why do you think the poems were spread out rather than all together? Did this work or would they have been better together? Why?