Brendon gallacher by jackie kay and the house by matthew sweeny essay

This line, simply stated, suggests a friendship between the two children, who could relate to each other by talking about their fathers, or about their siblings, or heritage. (…) I’d tell my mum about Brendon Gallacher.

Oh my Brendon Gallacher. Jackie Kay is a Scottish writer of mixed ethnicity. She was born in Edinburgh in 1961 and adopted by a family from Glasgow, where she grew up. She often draws on her childhood and family situation in her writing.

The poem uses Gallacher in such a way, exploring the thin divide between reality and a child’s reality, and the point by which they’ve grown up, casting away their imaginary friends and embracing their real ones.

This is most obvious in her poems based on the life of the jazz singer, Bessie Smith, but is inherent in all her work, particularly in her use of refrain. Her repetition of lines and phrases is often affiliated with loss, in love poems such as ‘Spoons’ and ‘Her’ or in the wistful elegy for an imaginary childhood friend, ‘Brendon Gallacher’.