LAST Tuesday Jackie Kay was anointed Scotland’s third Makar, following Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan. On that evening Ms Kay, buzzing like a bee on steroids, appeared at the Mitchell Library as part of the Aye Write! book festival. “I’m your new Makar,” she kept repeating, as if testing the refrain of a poem in gestation.

It was a moment that would have moved even the most cynical of observers. For Ms Kay’s is the kind of story that warms the cockles of hearts. Born in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she and her older brother, Maxwell, were adopted by Helen and John Kay, both of whom were members of the Communist Party.

By Ms Kay’s own account, it was an idyllic, blessed and formative upbringing. Both her adoptive parents were uncommonly open-minded, kind and culturally attuned. The family home in Bishopbriggs was often full of fellow communists, debating, singing, eating, drinking and dancing. Her father, Ms Kay once recalled, epitomised the two meanings of the word "party": “he is a party man and he loves to party”. Both parents were at the Mitchell to applaud their daughter. John Kay is 90 while Helen is five years younger.

In her spiel before reading Lochaline Stores, Ms Kay told how a laminated copy of the poem is now on display in the eponymous shop. When she mentioned this to her father, he quipped that while Carol Ann Duffy, Ms Kay’s former partner, was the poet laureate, Jackie Kay might be called “the poet laminate”.

Such wit is much in evidence in The Empathetic Store, her latest collection which runs to just 36 pages. In many respects, it is the perfect introduction to the new Makar’s work. It is political with a small "p", personal with a capital "P", and, though Ms Kay presently spends much of her time outwith Scotland and Glasgow, it is rooted in the language and accent of her birthplace.

She is concerned about the state of the planet, about the way we treat our fellow human beings, especially with how we behave towards the marginalised. What shines through these beautifully-presented pages most brilliantly, though, is love. Kay loves to love and loves to hear people express love. In Diamond Colonsay, for example, she writes: “What joy to see love endure, dears/To come down the stairs at Glassard/To overhear I love you John Kay/I love you Helen Kay."

In less assured hands, this could come across as schmaltzy, like the sentiments that embellish Hallmark cards. Yet in Ms Kay’s, one senses only sincerity, that what she is capturing in a few, seemingly plain lines is the very essence of what everyone is seeking. It is affirmation of what Philip Larkin acknowledged in his poem, An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.”

Another theme of this champagne collection is old age. What happens as we grow older is that people treat us differently, that we are diminished in their eyes, that our physical frailty gives them licence to patronise. What many people see are our shells, not who we were and what we did before infirmity struck and we joined the zimmer brigade.

April Sunshine is a plea to look beyond the cover and explore the contents of the book. It tells of her parents’ past, of their interest in the arts, and their attendance at the opening nights of The Steamie and Bevellers, of how they marched against Polaris, and wrote supportively to Nelson Mandela and “fifty other prisoners” in apartheid South Africa. Helen and John Kay are a couple who have lived all their long lives “for democracy, for democracy”. But in a hospital, all of this goes unremembered. “In the hospital this bleak mid winter,/You were just an old woman;/You were just an old man.”

It is the word “just” that irks most and which Ms Kay invites her readers to spit out like a pip. Her poems, which are invariably humourful, are a means of instigating change. At the Mitchell she aligned herself with Shelley, when he said that, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". It is something with which Ms Kay is refreshingly comfortable. Her ambition for poetry and what it might achieve is likewise bracing. It has, she believes, the power to transform lives and shape societies.

Another example of this is Here’s My Pitch. It is addressed to Arthur Wharton, who is believed to have been the world’s first professional black footballer. Kay once read the poem at half-time at Sheffield United, one of Wharton’s clubs, in front of a crowd of thousands. Wharton played in an era – the late 19th century – when black players were an oddity and subject to racism, a curse from which the beautiful game still suffers. Kay knows this, of course, but she knows too that times have changed and that the situation facing “the first black blade” was much worse than that which black footballers experience today.

This, then, is a commemorative collection as well as a celebratory one. Here are poems that read like lyrics to songs while others have an anthemic, rousing quality. In Lochaline Stores, the empathetic store of the title, nothing is missed, everything is overheard, all is available, no wish or desire goes unsatisfied.

This is the kind of poetry that reassures and inspires, much more of which, one hopes, we will see from our newest Makar.The

The Empathetic Store by Jackie Kay is published by Mariscat Press (£6)