The Colour of Black & White

Poems 1984–2003

,

• Publisher: Polygon
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857900098
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The celebrated Scottish poet presents a collection of poems from the intimate to the bawdy—paired with original linocut artwork by Willie Rodger. Liz Lochhead is one of Scotland's most beloved contemporary poets. In this wide-ranging collection, she offers poems of love, death and iconic figures; Jungian archetypes who often speak in their own voices. There are also poems set in her native Lanarkshire; poems dedicated to other poets; and a section of "unrespectable" poetry—rude verses, rhyming toasts, and music hall monologues. The collaboration with the printmaker Willie Rodger was also an essential part of the making of this book. Lochhead, long an admirer of Rodger's work, felt that he was a kindred spirit. His poetically pared down and essential linocuts accentuate the positive and the negative, the black and the white.

VIII

Year 2K email epistle to Carol Ann Duffy,
Sister-poet & Friend of my Youth

Duffy, I’m fifty-two – how come?

I’m a wife. You’re over forty and a mum.

Clichés like tempus fugit, yeah it’s going some

Fall from our lips.

– While into each new moment, day, millennium

Your Ella skips.

Ella skips. Time marches on. We’re history

By two thousand and something or other, A.D.

If forward though we canna see

We guess and fear,

We’ll live as though we don’t, OK? From me –

Happy New Year.

Black and White Allsorts

for Jackie Kay

a liquorice bootlace

a cultured pearl necklace

a little black dress

lux flakes, snowflakes

sno-pake, tippex

a black bra

a zebra, an op-art umbrella

ebony, ivory, black Sobranie, a skunk

a black eye, a white feather, a pool of printers ink

a brand new broderie anglais bikini

pasta al nero di seppia (squid ink linguini)

one single earring of jingling jet

and, like a big black sugar-cube, a perfect briquette

black suede boots just out of the box

and, to go with your good black patent shoes, pet,

new white socks

coconut, caviar, a wee pet lamb

a jar of home-made blackcurrant jam

spilt salt, wet tar, black ointment, The Broons

a box of Black Magic and an old black-and-white

on a Sunday afternoon

a white dove

a long black glove

a scoosh of mousse, the full moon

a soot crust, a snowball, a Lee’s macaroon

a meringue, mascara, a dollop of Nivea

talc on black lino

the (shuttered) dark

a dropped domino

a white angora bolero

two daft dalmations in the snow

in Kelvingro-

ve park

Hell for Poets

It’s Hell for the poet arriving for the gig

Off the five thirty three to meet the organiser

Who claps her in a car that reeks enough of dog to make her

gag,

Tells her he’s looked at her work but he was none the wiser.

Call him old fashioned, but in the ‘little mag

He edits for his sins’ stuff rhymes – oh, he’s no sympathiser

With this modern stuff! Is it prose? What is it?

Perhaps the poet can enlighten him this visit?

– For which his lady-wife’s made up a futon hard as boulders

In the boxroom. ‘So much friendlier than an hotel!’

Will anyone turn up tonight? Shrug of his shoulders.

‘Even for McGough or Carol Ann Duffy tickets have not been

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• LINO AND WOODCUTS
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• About the Author
• BY THE SAME AUTHOR
• PUBLISHED PLAYS
• Copyright