Essay Questions

What is unusual about the point-of-view choice in “Darling” and many other poems in Kay’s body of work?

Poetry is often considered to be the most personal form of literature. The iconic portrait of a poet is the self-absorbed, broken-hearted loner expressing the pain of the world through verse. While Kay’s poetry features multiple examples of first-person perspective, one of the most distinctive things about the full body of work is the plethora of poems that are written from the second-person perspective. For instance, the opening line of “Darling” offers an excellent example:

“You might forget the exact sound of her voice

Or how her face looked when sleeping.”

What is particularly noticeable about Kay’s use of second-person point-of-view—which this example illustrates perfectly—is that the perspective rarely actually seems to be implicating the reader. The reader instead immediately intuits that the speaker here is talking about the speaker when using “you” rather than the reader. And this is the case across the broad swath of Kay’s poetry.

In the long-form work of verse collectively known as The Adoption Papers, what is unusual about the use of perspective?

The Adoption Papers is constructed as a three-part series of poems further broken down into individual chapters within each part. The result is a sequence of narrative verse in which the second-person perspective is eschewed in favor of distinctly first-person accounts given by three different characters: a daughter, her adoptive mother, and her birth mother. In 1990, this work was presented on BBC Radio 3 as a drama in which each character could be differentiated by the voice of the actors playing the parts. In the printed collection subtitled New & Selected Poems, this differential is presented not by identifying the speaker by their familial description—as is usually the case in printed versions of dramatic literature—but rather though an unusual and fascinating method. The perspective being given at any point in The Adoption Papers is made clear through the user of font: the daughter is indicated by Palatino typeface while the adoptive mother is printed using Gill and the words of the birth mother appear in Bodoni.

In the poem “Dracula” who is the title character?

This seems like an obvious enough answer. After all, the poem is a mere 24 lines and presented as a straightforward narrative using common language. Turns out, however, that this is yet another example of Kay likes to play around with the notion of perspective in her verse. The speaker point-of-view is never in doubt: it is clearly a first-person recollection of an adult remembering an incident from a childhood trip to Romania. While in bed at night in the same country where exists a structure high in the mountains known as Dracula’s Castle, the speaker is awakened in the middle of the night by a figure in black standing on the verandah. Terrified to the point of bathing in sweat, the speaker crawls from that bed to the bed in which daddy is supposed to be sleeping. Except daddy’s not there. Daddy becomes the title character of Dracula in the revelation of a prank being played upon his unsuspecting offspring. The final three-line stanza, however, repositions this memory as the speaker essentially asks who needs the real Dracula to scare a child as long as they have parents willing to do the deed instead?