A Choosing E-Book

Liz Lochhead

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 75

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

During her career Liz Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that 'when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I'd like to be a poet in the theatre.' Liz Lochhead has a large and devoted audience and delights audiences where she goes.

Leseprobe

A Choosing

Other titles by Liz Lochhead

Memo for Spring (1972)

Islands (1978)

The Grimm Sisters (1981)

Dreaming Frankenstein (1984)

True Confessions and New Clichés (1985)

Bagpipe Muzak (1991)

The Colour of Black and White (2003)

This edition first published in paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by

Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

ISBN 978 1 84967 207 8

eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 104 0

Copyright © Liz Lochhead 1969–2011

Foreword © Carol Ann Duffy 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The moral right of Liz Lochhead to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset in Dante by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

for Tom, always

Contents

Foreword

Author’s Note

A Night In

Persimmons

Neckties

Vow: The Simplest, Hardest and the Truest Thing

Epithalamium

View of Scotland/Love Poem

After the War

1953

Sorting Through

Social History

Some Old Photographs

For my Grandmother Knitting

Poem for my Sister

My Mother’s Suitors

Poppies

Lanarkshire Girls

The Choosing

Kidspoem/Bairnsang

In the Dreamschool

The Teachers

After a Warrant Sale

Fragmentary

The Offering

Obituary

Poem for Other Poor Fools

Inventory

Revelation

An Abortion

Notes on the Inadequacy of a Sketch

Laundrette

The Bargain

5th April 1990

Hafiz on Danforth Avenue

Fourth of July Fireworks

Ontario October Going West

The Empty Song

Noises in the Dark

My Rival’s House

Midsummer Night

What the Pool Said, on Midsummer’s Day

Dreaming Frankenstein

Smirnoff for Karloff

Fetch on the First of January

Mirror’s Song

Rapunzstiltskin

Spinster

Bawd

Song of Solomon

The Other Woman

The Hickie

Last Supper

Everybody’s Mother

The Man in the Comic Strip

Ira and George

The Baker

The New-married Miner

Poets Need Not

Notes on Sources

Foreword

Liz Lochhead first appeared in print in 1972 with the award-winning publication Memo for Spring, and it is hard to say when a small pamphlet of poems has made such an impact. Lochhead’s Spring blossomed out into the very male landscape of Scottish poetry and somehow managed to make that landscape female. Throughout her subsequent work, in poems such as ‘What the Pool Said, on Midsummer’s Day’, Liz Lochhead has continued to find new ways through language of claiming her country. Her appointment as Makar in 2011, succeeding her dear friend Edwin Morgan, had a sense of rightness and inevitability about it. Her unique voice, a warm broth of quirky rhythms, streetwise speech patterns, showbiz pazzaz, tender lyricism and Scots, liberated a generation of women writers: Kathleen Jamie, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many more have all been influenced and inspired by her.

Lochhead’s early work combined wit and poetry with a feminist aesthetic that felt fresh and exciting, and her work continues to display a zeitgeisty energy. Her monologues about ordinary women in trying or comic situations gained her a popularity which sees her today established as a National Treasure, and yet she remains essentially modest and humble – a modesty rooted in her skill and sensitivity as a love poet. The recent love poems which open this collection are among her finest work.

There’s a famous painting by Sandy Moffat, Poets’ Pub (1980) that depicts a literary world populated exclusively by men. It would be impossible to paint that picture today, because the faces of Scottish writers have changed forever, and much of that is due to Lochhead – a pioneer in her own country, a trailblazer. ‘Poets need not be garlanded,’ writes Liz Lochhead in the final poem here – but she is garlanded, justly so, and is well loved for her generous, life-enhancing poetry.

Carol Ann Duffy, June 2011

Author’s Note

I don’t want to say anything about the poems in this book except: here they are. (A boy in a school once said to me, ‘See when you wrote that poem about the bull, what were you really trying to say?’ – a question which both struck me dumb and made me sad for him; his teaching had made him feel that a poem was a coded way of saying something else. A tedious code, too, that he had to crack, and prove he’d cracked it in an essay, and pass an exam. ‘Well, that really,’ was all I could, eventually, manage.)

About this particular choosing (though another day, another year, I might have come out with a quite different selection, who knows?) – and, especially about the ordering of the poems, all I’ll say is the obvious: that they aren’t put together chronologically, but I’ve, instead, let one poem suggest a following sister poem that seems, to me at least, somehow to belong with it.

So that, for instance, a poem like ‘The Choosing’ – personal, autobiographical and one of the first things I ever wrote (about forty-five years ago in the late 1960s when I was eighteen) finds itself up against ‘Kidspoem/Bairnsang’, a ‘first-the-phone-call’ poem originally written on commission for a BBC London Education programme – sometime in the mid or late 1990s – as ‘a dialect poem’ with the worthy aim of encouraging school children from John O’ Groats to Land’s End to realise they had the right to keep writing, ‘creatively’ at least, in ‘hometown English’. It was an occasional piece that I decided later was worth keeping – and worth promoting to ‘poem’ status.

See, I do write quite a lot of ‘occasional’ poems, light verse, rhyming – often rude-and-rhyming – poems, entertainments, out-loud performance pieces, dramatic monologues – and I’m certainly not ashamed of them at all. They are good fun (as well as sometimes, technically, quite hard work) to write, and, yes, audiences at poetry readings enjoy them. But in A Choosing you won’t find the ‘Vymura Shade Card’ or ‘Verena’, just the ones which finally retain enough mystery for me to think of them as ‘proper poems’.

It is painful going back over your own work, your own life, but, in the end, I quite enjoyed and became interested in making what seemed to me to be these new connections strung out over time, even if to others they might well appear to be just a lucky bag, a random flinging-together without much rhyme or reason.

It is a pleasure, though, to see the making of the book get to its final stages, to proof it, to work with others on choosing the cover. From among a few drawings of mine I’ve kept, charcoal or oil-pastel studies for long-lost canvases from my first year at Glasgow School of Art – drawings done at exactly the same time as I was writing the very earliest pieces in this book like ‘The Choosing’ – everyone seems to want to go with Girl Undressing: black bra, red tights, pink shoes from 1967. This feels like a nice emotional connection in 2011.

I’d like to thank, very much indeed, for their advice with the contents of this selection – I really could not have done it without them – Robyn Marsack of the Scottish Poetry Library, and Peggy Hughes of the same excellent organisation. And Sarah Ream – a brilliant editor from initial concept down to sensitive nit-picking proofing and copy-editing. And, as ever, my patient editor at Polygon, Neville Moir, and book-designer, book-lover, Jim Hutcheson – indeed to all at Polygon. Thanks to all these good friends.

And – above all – to Carol Ann Duffy, not just for her introduction here, but for her generosity, support, good advice, love and encouragement, which I depend on always, in my life as well as in my work.

A Choosing

A Night In

Darling, tonight I want to celebrate

not your birthday, no, nor mine.

It’s not the anniversary of when we met,

first went to bed or got married, and the wine

is supermarket plonk. I’m just about to grate

rat-trap cheddar on the veggie bake that’ll do us fine.

But it’s far from the feast that – knowing you’ll be soon,

and suddenly so glad to just be me and here,

now, in our bright kitchen – I wish I’d stopped and gone

and shopped for, planned and savoured earlier.

Come home! It’s been a long day. Now the perfect moon

through our high windows rises round and clear.

Persimmons

(for Tom)

you must’ve

loved

those three globes of gorgeous orange

dense and glowing in our winter kitchen

enough

to put coloured pencil and biro to the

reddest page left in your rainbow sketchbook

and make this drawing of

three persimmons in that Chinese bowl.

the supermarket flagged them up as

this season’s sharon fruit