The Colour of Black and White is Liz Lochhead’s first collection of poems for more than a dozen years, and, for her, the most important since the award-winning Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems in 1984.
The poems within this remarkable collection are often poems of love or death and iconic figures, Jungian archetypes, animus figures with strong outlines, harsh comfort and, often, voices of their own which dominate the first, the ’title’, section of the book.
Here you can find poems that are both autobiographical or entirely fictional set in Liz Lochhead’s native rural/industrial Lanarkshire. There are also poems dedicated to other poets and a section of the rude and the rhyming, the out-loud, boldly revealing Lochhead’s interest in ’unrespectable’ poetry, in black prison ’toasts’, in recitations, folk-poems and music hall monologues. The colour of both the black and the white.
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 strongly that he was a kindred spirit and his poetically pared down and essential lino cuts accentuate the positive and the negative, the black and the white.
Liz Lochhead is regarded as one of Scotland’s most popular poets and dramatists, born in Motherwell in Lanarkshire on 26 December 1947. Her poetry is characterised by a self-conscious effort to mimic the idioms of speech, adopting a range of spoken styles that include the lyrical use of cliché, rap, colloquialism and even advertising language in an effort to raise the profile of the marginalised voices of both Scots and women. Her most famous poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), and Bagpipe Muzak (1991).
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