Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead Poems
for Robyn Marsack
Go take a book down from the shelf and open it.
Listen, this isn't ‘book' but box,
box full of sound you lift the lid on, opening.
...
Trouble is not my middle name.
It is not what I am.
I was not born for this.
Trouble is not a place
...
be garlanded;
the poet's head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.
...
Down on her hands and knees
at ten at night on Hogmanay,
my mother still giving it elbowgrease
jiffywaxing the vinolay. (This is too
...
weather evocative as scent
the romance of dark stormclouds
in big skies over the low wide river
of long shadows and longer shafts of light
...
I am talking in our lingua franca.
Tell me, do you drive on the left or right?
Is your football team the Botswana Zebras
Or Indomitable Lions of Cameroon?
...
‘Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's - from John Donne's
'A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, being the Shortest Day'.
At midday on the year's midnight
...
The moment she died, my mother's dance dresses
turned from the colours they really were
to the colours I imagine them to be.
...
Friendship is a real boat,
Clydebuilt like the best of them,
pride and strength in every rivet and spot weld.
A vessel to last lifetimes, to carry a bond
...
She is getting good and ready to renounce
his sweet flesh.
Not just for lent. (For
Ever)
...
is peopled with many surfaces.
Ormolu and gilt, slipper satin,
lush velvet couches,
cushions so stiff you can't sink in.
...
Molly Pin Li McLaren,
come home and look
at the pictures in your brand-new book -
a tree, a bird, a fish, a bell,
...
The present author being, from her mother's milk,
a lover of the poetic effusions of Mr Robert Burns and
all creatures therein (whether mouse, louse, yowe, dug
or grey mare Meg) was nonetheless appalled to find,
...
"If freedom an whisky gang thegither": Robert Burns
i.
When we sit wined and finely dined,
Dressed up in oor best, braw and fancy,
...
There is no need they say
but the needles still move
their rhythms in the working of your hands
as easily
as if your hands
...
Liz Lochhead Biography
Liz Lochhead (born 26 December 1947) is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland. Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in a “little ex-mining village just outside Motherwell”, Lanarkshire. Her mother and father had both served in the army during the Second World War, and later, her father was a local government clerk. In 1952 the family moved into a new council house in the mining village of Newarthill, where her sister was born in 1957. Though she was encouraged by her teachers to study English, Lochhead was determined to go to Glasgow School of Art where she studied between 1965 and 1970. After graduation Lochhead taught art at High Schools in Glasgow and Bristol, a career at which she says she was "terrible)
The Best Poem Of Liz Lochhead
Random
for Robyn Marsack
Go take a book down from the shelf and open it.
Listen, this isn't ‘book' but box,
box full of sound you lift the lid on, opening.
Yes, open any item in this place and you'll release
some specific human noise and voice and
song that doesn't need a tune to all-the-truer sing.
Pick one. Pick anything.
Slim volume. Expansive, all-inclusive, fat anthology -
neither's a dumb tome of texts to tease mere ‘meaning' from.
The song's the thing.
And the beauty is, it does away with time, that's meaningless
when - this is random, but, say, you flick a page, here's…
oh, Ben Jonson
and one man's singular, centuries-old, grief on the death of ‘My
First Sonne'
(here doth lie…his best piece of poetrie)
that chimes and rhymes with that here-and-now sorrow of your very own
and, hurt by his and stung to tears,
you're somehow for a moment almost comforted
because he had the guts to tell it terrible and true.
Listen, this library-silence thrums
with lyric, epic, ‘language', temporarily caged and page-bound
loud hip-hop, rap, Burns, Bard, Scots, Gaelic, Lallans - here's
the murmur of the modernists,
the auld breath-and-beat of the balladeer,
oh, and - a word in your ear -
they've got a lot of her, thank God, so - hypocrite lecteur, ton semblable,
ta soeur et ton frère - dae mind Anon,
she's aye been baith the real McCoy
and your perfect contemporary.
All that. And yet it's not… cacophony.
Go in. Pick up a book. Enjoy.
Liz Lochhead Comments
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4/16/2026 4:15:38 AM # 1.0.0
Liz lockhead is one of the most interesting poet