Life mask - Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay's Life Mask is about love, loss, secrets and mistaken identity. These searching poems reveal the many ways people hide from each other and from themselves. They show how appearances are deceptive, and how many faces we make up in one face. Unpeeling the mask, she confronts her own past and her fears: meeting her father for the first time in Nigeria and ending a long-term relationship. Masks are about masquerade, camouflage, trickery, hypocrisy and stealth. They connect with running away, with how we conceal our feelings and hide from the truth. Jackie Kay's Life Mask poems penetrate the nature of love, showing how love is a kind of belief, and loss of love involves a loss of faith. But then they open out: coming clean, they blow their cover, drop the mask, give themselves away: the truth is often hooded or disguised, and honesty itself can be a kind of a mask. Life Mask isn't only concerned with love and loss but also with light and renewal, with honesty, assertion and being yourself, and with moving on to find a new sense of self-belief. Life Mask is now out of print but all the poems from the collection are included in Darling: New & Selected Poems (2007).