My Father’s Kites Allison Joseph

Allison Joseph · Leaving Cert Poetry

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

Context

Allison Joseph was born in 1967 and is an American poet. This poem comes from her 2010 collection, which she wrote after her father had died, so you should read everything in it through the lens of grief. The speaker is looking back, as an adult, at a man who is now gone.

One thing trips students up straight away, so sort it out before the exam. The title is the grammatical subject of the first line. The poem does not open with “the kites”; it opens with the verb, so the sentence really reads “My father’s kites were crude assemblages of paper sacks and twine”. Once you see that the title leads into the first line, the whole opening makes sense. Joseph is describing what her father made, and she is doing it from memory, years later, on a street of poverty she clearly wanted to leave.

Key Moments

The poem moves in two clear stages. For most of it you watch the father at work, making something out of nothing in front of a poor house. Notice how plain and unromantic the materials are.

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

Then comes the launch, the small drama of getting a homemade thing to fly at all. The speaker remembers the difficulty and the waiting, the squint into a hard sky.

“How tricky the launch / into air, the wait for the right eddy to lift”My Father’s Kites

The turn arrives when the kite comes down. The collapse of the kite becomes the collapse of everything, and the poem stops being a memory and becomes an act of mourning. From here Joseph speaks straight to her dead father.

“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 him in her mind by holding the thing he used to do. The second is ambition and escape from poverty. The kite is never just a kite. It is the father’s will to rise above a street of “dented cars and stolid brick houses”, to make beauty where there was only “stony land”. The third theme is inheritance. By the end the daughter has taken on her father’s restless reaching, his refusal to stay grounded, and she carries it whether she wants to or not. Keep all three in play. A strong answer shows you how one image, the kite, carries grief, ambition and inheritance at the same time.

Literary Devices

The biggest device is the extended metaphor. The kite stands for the father’s ambition, his attempt to rise out of poverty, and Joseph builds the whole poem on it. She backs it with hard poverty imagery and with a contrast between freedom and being stuck, the cars going nowhere while planes head off to a world the family cannot reach.

“monstrously immobile, and planes, bound / for that world we could not see”My Father’s Kites

Enjambment is everywhere, and Joseph even runs a sentence across a stanza break so the kites “rise” only after the white space, which makes the words act out the lift they describe. Watch too how the speaker becomes the kite herself near the end, balancing as if she were the flimsy thing in the wind.

“balance my weight / as if on paper wings, a flutter then fall,”My Father’s Kites

The closing image of two hands on one ball of string is the inheritance made physical: the father teaching, the daughter learning, the lesson outliving him.

Mood

The mood shifts, and you should track that shift rather than name one feeling. Early on it is admiring and a little wondering, the child amazed that her father could make rubbish fly. Later it darkens into loss. The “sad tangle” after the flight signals the change in tone, and the direct address to the dead father gives the ending a quiet ache. It is not sentimental. Joseph stays precise and unshowy, which is exactly why the grief lands.

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 will have a clear, honest answer.

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