My Father’s Kites Alison Joseph

Alison Joseph · Leaving Cert Poetry

A grown daughter remembers her father building kites out of rubbish, and turns the memory into a poem about grief, ambition and what a parent leaves behind.

Context

The poem’s American diction and imagery place it in a working-class urban American setting: an adult speaker looking back at a father who has since died, remembering him building kites out of whatever he could find. One thing trips students up straight away, so sort it before the exam. The title is the grammatical subject of the first line: the poem does not open with a noun, it opens with a verb, and that verb’s missing subject is supplied by the title sitting above it. Once you see that the title feeds directly into the opening line, the rest of the poem makes sense. Joseph writes in ten three-line stanzas with no fixed rhyme or metre, and she runs sentences across almost every stanza break, so the shape of the poem keeps pulling you forward the way a kite pulls upward on its string. Read the poem twice before you try to analyse it: once for the story of a father flying homemade kites, and a second time watching for the moment that story turns into something else.

Key Moments

The poem opens by naming exactly how ordinary the materials were. Nothing here is romanticised before it has earned it.

“were crude assemblages of paper sacks and twine,”My Father’s Kites

The setting is drawn just as plainly: a street of parked, going-nowhere cars and near-identical houses, the kind of place a homemade kite in flight looks almost out of the question.

“of dented cars and stolid brick houses could?”My Father’s Kites

The turn comes when the kite comes down. Its collapse becomes the poem’s own collapse, from memory into open grief, and the speaker stops describing her father and starts speaking straight to him.

“Father, you left me / with this unsated need”My Father’s Kites

Key Themes

The first theme is grief and memory. The father is dead, and the poem is the daughter holding onto him by holding onto the thing he used to do with her. The second is ambition and the wish to rise above poverty: the kite is never just a kite, it is the father’s refusal to stay stuck on a street of stationary cars and packed houses. The third is inheritance. By the end the daughter has taken on her father’s restless reaching, whether she wants it or not. Keep all three themes moving together rather than treating them as separate points. A strong Ordinary Level answer shows how one image, the kite, carries grief, ambition and inheritance all at once, and does not need three separate paragraphs to say so.

Literary Devices

The central device is the extended metaphor: the kite stands for the father’s drive to rise above hardship, and Joseph builds the whole poem around it. Enjambment does a lot of the work too, with sentences running across almost every stanza break so the poem’s shape keeps lifting, the way a kite lifts, rather than settling into neat, closed units. Near the end the speaker becomes the kite herself, unsteady in the air, before the poem lands on its final, tactile image of two hands sharing one length of string, the father teaching, the daughter learning, the lesson outliving him.

“your hand over mine over balled string.”My Father’s Kites

Mood

The mood shifts, so track the shift rather than naming one single feeling. Early on it is admiring and a little puzzled, a child amazed that her father could make rubbish fly. It darkens into loss once the kite comes down and the direct address to the dead father begins. It is not sentimental. Joseph stays precise and plain-spoken throughout, which is exactly why the final ache lands as hard as it does.

Conclusion

This is a poem about a father, a poem about being poor and wanting more, and a poem about what gets passed down. Joseph takes one ordinary memory, a man flying a homemade kite, and lets it carry her whole sense of who she is and where she came from. For Ordinary Level you do not need to say everything. Pin down the two halves, the making and the mourning, anchor each with a short quote, and you have a clear, honest answer.

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