Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead Poems
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
...
Trouble is not my middle name.
It is not what I am.
I was not born for this.
Trouble is not a place
...
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
...
She is getting good and ready to renounce
his sweet flesh.
Not just for lent. (For
Ever)
...
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
...
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.
...
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
...
The river in January is fast and high.
You and I
are off to the Barrows.
Gathering police-horses twitch and fret
at the Tron end of London Road and Gallowgate.
...
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,
...
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
Poets need not
be garlanded;
the poet's head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.
And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded
for the love of trying to nail the disembodied
image with that one plain word to make it palpable;
for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable
of carrying the thought that's not thought yet?
The pursuit's its own reward. So you have to let
the poem come to voice by footering
late in the dark at home, by muttering
syllables of scribbled lines - or what might
be lines, eventually, if you can get it right.
And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train,
the biro, the back of an envelope, and again
the fun of the wildgoose chase
that goes beyond all this fuss.
Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops,
the light-bulb goes on and tops
the not-good-enough idea that went before?
No, that's not how it goes. You write, you score
it out, you write it in again the same
but somehow with a different stress. This is a game
you very seldom win
and most of your efforts end up in the bin.
There's one hunched and gloomy heron
haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin
and it wouldn't if there were no fish.
If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash,
a gleam of something, made that quick stab.
That's how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab
at that anything and this is food to you.
It comes through, as leaves do.
All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen - even rarely -
crown them with green.
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4/26/2024 8:01:39 PM # 1.0.0.1119
Liz lockhead is one of the most interesting poet