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    The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003
    The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003
    The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003
    Ebook144 pages56 minutes

    The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003

    By Liz Lochhead

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 1, 2011
    ISBN9780857900098
    The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003
    Author

    Liz Lochhead

    Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell in 1947. While studying at the Glasgow School of Art she began to write seriously, gradually losing her way with her initial dream of becoming a painter. Her first book of poetry, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and sold 5,000 copies. The Scottish-Canadian Writers Exchange Fellowship,1978–9, marked her transition to full-time writer. She has since published several plays and poetry collections including A Choosing and most recently Fugitive Colours. Liz Lochhead was Scots Makar from 2011–2016.

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      Book preview

      The Colour of Black & White - Liz Lochhead

      I

      The Unknown Citizen

      How to exist

      except

      in a land of unreadable signs and ambiguous symbols

      except

      between the hache and the ampersand

      except

      between the ankh and the ziggurat

      between the fylfot and the fleur de lys

      between the cross and the crescent

      between the twinned sigrunes and the swastika

      or the sauvastika its mirror image, its opposite –

      meaning darkness/light whichever –

      with a blank page for a passport

      except

      under some flag

      some bloody flag with a

      crucially five

      (or a six or a seven)

      pointed star?

      The Man in the Comic Strip

      For the man in the comic strip

      things are not funny. No wonder he’s

      running in whichever direction his pisspoor

      piston legs are facing

      getting nowhere fast.

      If only he had the sense he was born with

      he’d know there is a world of difference

      between the thinks bubble and the speech balloon

      and when to keep it zipped, so, with a visible fastener.

      But his mouth is always getting him into trouble.

      Fistfights blossom round him,

      there are flowers explode when the punches connect.

      A good idea is a lightbulb, but too seldom.

      When he curses, spirals

      and asterisks and exclamation marks

      whizz around his head like his always palpable distress.

      Fear comes off him like petals from a daisy.

      Anger brings lightning down on his head and

      has him hopping.

      Hunger fills the space around him

      with floating ideograms of roasted chickens

      and iced buns like maidens’ breasts the way

      the scent of money fills his eyes with dollar signs.

      For him the heart is always a beating heart,

      True Love –

      always comically unrequited.

      The unmistakeable silhouette of his one-and-only

      will always be kissing another

      behind the shades at her window

      and, down-at-the-mouth, he’ll

      always have to watch it from the graphic

      lamplit street.

      He never knows what is around the corner

      although we can see it coming.

      When he is shocked his hair stands perfectly on end.

      But his scream is a total zero and he knows it.

      Knows to beware of the zigzags of danger,

      knows how very different from

      the beeline of zees that is a hostile horizontal buzzing

      of singleminded insects swarming after him

      are the gorgeous big haphazard zeds of sleep.

      In the Black and White Era

      for Ian McMillan

      ‘Hitchcock,

      there was a Hitchcock on.’ he said. ‘Lifeboat.

      I’d harped on about it that much that Dad and I

      had stayed up late to watch it.

      Cocoa, and there we were, father and son in

      nineteen-fifties checky dressing gowns and striped pyjamas.

      Mum was up late too, footering with the packing

      because next day we were going on our holidays.

      The big black and white TV

      was a boiling box of cruel grey sea,’

      he said, ‘when the door went.

      We were normally such a family of early bedders too,

      and my Mum was all for not answering –

      the time of night and us going our holidays tomorrow –

      which wasn’t a bit like her, not normally,

      and obviously – door went again, and then again –

      wasn’t going to be on, now was it? So

      when she changed her tune from

      Don’t go, Jack, to You better go, Jack,

      Dad tied his cord again tighter and went to answer it.

      What I remember, and I do remember

      whatever my Mum says, and though my Dad denies it,

      is the man sitting there on our settee,

      sitting there the way no visitor ever sat,

      not normally, without so much as a cup of tea

      and a biscuit, which was unheard of, with that big dog of his

      wetly wolfing down the water my mother –

      and this wasn’t like her – had so very grudgingly

      brought it in that flowered bowl I’d never seen before.

      I’ve never seen you before in my life,

      said my Dad to the man. And, honestly

      it wasn’t like him to be blunt like that.

      This was after the man looked long at him and said,

      "I know you, you’re Jack Jones, I was

      on the same ship as you, Ark Royal, remember?"

      My Mum was wringing her hands and saying,

      "A fine time of night this is to come to folk’s door –

      and here they’re away on their holidays tomorrow too!

      You with your shaggydog stories of walking to Hamilton

      and needing a bowl of water for your dog.

      The doorstep wasn’t good enough for you, was it?"

      The TV was still on. Lifeboat. Which, with

      a visitor in, it wouldn’t have been, not normally.

      A Hitchcock I never saw the end of,

      not that night,

      and as far as I know has never been repeated.’

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