This image is the cover for the book Colour of Black & White

Colour of Black & White

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.

Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead is the Scottish Makar (Poet Laureate) and is regarded as one of Scotland's best andmost popular poets and dramatists. 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 cliche, 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 Cliches" (1985) and"Bagpipe Muzak" (1991). She became Makar in 2011 after the death of Edwin Morgan."

Birlinn Ltd.