Dusting the Phone — Jackie Kay
Dusting the Phone — Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay’s “Dusting the Phone” captures the agony of waiting for a lover to call. Written as a single, spiralling monologue, the poem takes place entirely inside the speaker’s head as she swings between hope and dread. The named poem is printed on the exam paper, so for the specified-poem question you can quote directly from it; for the comparison question no text is given beyond a list of titles, so you must learn short quotations from your chosen second poem and know which poems pair well with this one.
The Poem’s Situation
The poem opens with brutal honesty. The speaker admits she is “imagining the worst that could happen”, even though she knows this is “not a good idea”. She recognises that being in love should mean dwelling on “the best that has been happening” instead, but her anxious mind will not cooperate. This gap between what she should feel and what she actually feels sets up the poem’s central tension.
Kay builds anxiety through repetition and contradiction. Whether the phone rings or stays silent, the outcome feels equally threatening: the phone rings “heralding some disaster”, but “it doesn’t ring which also means disaster” too — both possibilities end in the single word “Sirens”, repeated twice. The speaker cannot escape her fear whatever happens.
The uncertainty spreads beyond the phone itself. The speaker imagines a chaotic set of possible futures, described through a comma-less list: “A marriage. A full house.” and time spent “in stranger’s white sheets”. She pictures “the future” as “a long gloved hand” and “an empty cup” — strange, ominous images with no clear meaning, mirroring racing thoughts that jump from one possibility to the next without pause.
Jackie Kay — Poet and Context
Jackie Kay (born 1961) is a Scottish poet and novelist. She served as the National Poet for Scotland, known as the Makar, between 2016 and 2021. Kay’s poetry is known for its warm, conversational voice and its honest exploration of relationships, identity and belonging. “Dusting the Phone” uses this same direct, everyday language to explore an experience many readers recognise: the powerlessness of waiting for someone to make contact.
Themes: Obsession and the Fragility of Modern Love
The poem is a dramatic monologue, spoken by the anxious lover from start to finish. Kay explores how love can tip into obsession: the speaker admits “I am trapped in it. I can’t move.” and wants her lover “all the time”. These short, blunt sentences contrast with the poem’s earlier long, breathless lines, capturing how obsessive thoughts can suddenly stop the speaker in her tracks.
The telephone becomes an object of near-religious devotion. The speaker calls her care of it “silver service”, then says “I polish it. I dress for it.” This extended metaphor of ceremonial preparation shows how far normal behaviour has been distorted by longing — an ordinary household object has become an altar.
Elsewhere the speaker’s desperation becomes almost comic and unsettling: she “assault[s] the postman for a letter” and “look[s] for flowers”, desperate for any sign of affection. Even unwanted contact is agony — “infuriatingly, it sends me hoaxes, wrong numbers” — because every call that is not from her lover is a fresh disappointment. When her lover’s voice does come, it “disappears into my lonely cotton sheets”, suggesting that even contact cannot fully satisfy her loneliness.
Kay writes in free verse, avoiding rhyme or a fixed rhythm so the poem sounds like a spontaneous, spiralling stream of thought. Frequent enjambment — for example “Your voice / disappears into my lonely cotton sheets” and “One night per week / in stranger’s white sheets” — mimics thoughts tumbling over one another without control, while the clipped, end-stopped fragments on a single line (“The future is a long gloved hand. An empty cup.”) jolt the reader from one image to the next. Kay also uses asyndeton in short, unlinked statements like “A marriage. A full house.”, speeding up the pace and suggesting panic. The poem is structurally circular: it opens with the speaker imagining disaster and ends with an unanswered demand — “Come on, damn you, ring me” — followed by “I don’t know what”, showing that her anxious cycle has no resolution.
“Dusting the Phone” pairs well with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 29”, because both poems show a speaker consumed by obsessive thoughts about a lover. Browning’s speaker admits her thoughts “twine and bud” around her lover like wild vines, wanting his real presence rather than her imagination of him. Kay’s speaker is similarly trapped by her own thoughts, though her tone is far more anxious than Browning’s calm confidence — a useful contrast for the comparison question.
The poem also compares well with Christina Rossetti’s “Cousin Kate”, since both present women left powerless by love. Rossetti’s speaker has been abandoned by “a great lord” and can only “howl in dust” over her situation, while Kay’s speaker waits helplessly for a phone call she cannot control. Both poems capture how love can strip a woman of agency, though Rossetti’s speaker suffers a public betrayal while Kay’s speaker’s suffering is private and psychological.