Fugitive Colours E-Book

Liz Lochhead

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

This stunning collection features never before published work along with poems written during her time as Scots Makar, and marks the end of her term as Scotland's Poet Laureate (2011-2016). Whether commissioned works, such as 'Connecting Cultures', written for the Commonwealth Games in 2014 or more personal works, 'Favourite Place', about holidays in the west coast with her late husband, this collection is beautiful, sensitive and brilliant. Throughout 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.'

Leseprobe

FUGITIVE COLOURS

Other titles by Liz Lochhead

POETRY

Memo for Spring (Reprographia, 1972)

Islands (Print Studio Press, 1978)

The Grimm Sisters (Next Editions, 1981)

Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, 1984)

True Confessions and New Clichés (Polygon, 1985)

Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991)

The Colour of Black & White (Polygon, 2003)

A Choosing (Polygon, 2011)

PLAYS

Blood and Ice (Meuthuen, 1984)

Mary Queen of Scots Gets Her Head Chopped Off (Penguin, 1988)

Dracula (Penguin, 1988)

Tartuffe (Nick Hern, 1998)

Perfect Days (Nick Hern, 1999)

Medea (Nick Hern, 2000)

Miseryguts (Nick Hern, 2002)

Thebans (Nick Hern, 2003)

Good Things (Nick Hern, 2006)

Educating Agnes (Nick Hern, 2008)

Five Plays (Nick Hern, 2012)

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House, 10 Newington Road

Edinburgh, EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-84697-345-1

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-336-5

Copyright © Liz Lochhead, 2016

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.

The publishers acknowledge investment from Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset in Verdigris MVB by 3btype.com

Printed and bound by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

for Tom, always

Contents

Love and Grief, Elegies and Promises

Favourite Place

Persimmons

A Handselling, 2006

Lavender’s Blue

The Optimistic Sound

Wedding Vow: The Simplest, Hardest and the Truest Thing

Anniversaries

A Cambric Shirt

The Light Comes Back

In the Mid-Midwinter

Autumn with Magpie, Pomegranate

Beyond It

How to Be the Perfect Romantic Poet

Ekphrasis, Etcetera

Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class, 1966

Some Old Photographs

‘The Scullery Maid’ and ‘The Cellar Boy’ by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

The Art of Willie Rodger

A Man Nearly Falling in Love

In Alan Davie’s Paintings

Three Stanzas for Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Labyrinth

Email to Alastair Cook

The Ballad of Elsie Inglis

Gallimaufry

Way Back in the Paleolithic

Kidspoems and Bairnsangs

How I’ll Decorate My Tree

Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme, Nursery Rhyme, for Molly

Nina’s Song

In Gaia’s Poetry

The Fruit of the Word

Makar Songs, Occassional and Performance Pieces Mainly

Poets Need Not

Connecting Cultures

Random

Open

Spring 2010, and at His Desk by the Window is Eddie in a Red Shirt

When the Poem Went to Prison

Listen

The Silk Road

In Praise of Monsieur Sax

Grace

Lines for the Centenary of the Scotch Whisky Association

From a Mouse

The Theatre Maker’s Credo

In Number One Dressing Room

Nick Dowp, Feeling Miscast in a Very English Production, Rehearses Bottom’s Dream

Epistle to David

Portait of a Gentleman at Sixty

Address to a Septuagenarian Gentleman at Home

For Myra McFadden on her Sixtieth Birthday

Song for a Dirty Diva

Another, Later, Song for that Same Dirty Diva

In Praise of Old Vinyl

Love and Grief,Elegies and Promises

Favourite Place

We would be snaking up Loch Lomond, the

road narrow and winding after the turn at Tarbert,

and we’d be bending branches as we slid

through the green and dripping overhang of the trees.

All the bickering over the packing, and the – as usual –

much, much later-than-we’d-meant-to leaving,

all that falling from us,

our moods lifting, lightening, becoming our good mood

the more miles we put

between our freed and weekend selves and Glasgow.

Driving in the dark meant: slot in another CD

without even looking at what it was,

another any-old silver-disc from the zippered case

that, when you reminded me, I’d have quickly stuffed

far too full and randomly, then jammed it,

last minute, into the top of my rucksack.

Golden oldies, yours or mine, whose favourite?

Anyway, the music would spool us through Tyndrum,

past the shut Real Food Café where other days we like to stop,

and over moonscape Rannoch Moor to the

moonlit majesty of Glencoe,

over the bridge at Ballachulish, past Corran

with the ferry stilled and the loch like glass;

we’d be wriggling along Loch Linnhe then straighten up

past the long strip of darkened lochside big hotels and their

Vacancies or No Vacancies signs

to 30 mph Fort William –

Full-Of-Rain-Town-With-Its-Limitless-Litres-In-A-Mist! –

we’d shout it out and we’d be honouring a

long-ago and someone else’s

family pass-the-time

car-journey game we never even played, but Michael,

proud of his teenage wordsmith son,

once told us about – and it has stuck.

We’d be speeding up now, taking the bend’s wide sweep as

we bypass the sleeping town, making for

the second-last turn-off: Mallaig and The Road To the Isles.

And you’d say,

‘Last thirty miles, Lizzie, we’ll be there by midnight’.

The always longest fifteen miles from Glenfinnan to Lochailort

and a wee cheer at the last turn,

down past the big house and the fish farm,

beyond the lay-by – full of travellers’ ramshackle vans

now the yellow’s on the broom again –

our eyes peeled now for the white-painted stone so we’ll not miss

the overgrown entrance to the field of caravans.

There would be that sigh of

always-glad-to-see our old van still standing,

opening the door, the sniffing – no dampness, no mice …

I’d be unloading the first cool-bags of food,

while you’d be round the van’s side, down in the mud

turning the stopcock for the water,

fixing the gas – and soon,

breathing a big sigh, laughing in relief at

how that huge stag that had suddenly filled the windscreen a mile back

stopping our hearts as – ho! – we’d shouted our alarm –

had somehow astonishly leapt free, was gone,

and no harm done,

we’d be lighting candles, pouring a dram,

drinking the first cup of tea

from the old black and white teapot.

And tonight the sky would be huge with stars.

Tomorrow there would be the distant islands

cut out of sugar paper, or else cloud, the rain in great veils

coming in across the water, the earliest tenderest

feathering of green on the trees, mibbe autumn

laying bare the birches stark white.

There would be blood-red rowan berries, that bold robin

eating from my plate again, or – for a week or two in May –

the elusive, insistent cuckoo,

or else the slow untidy flapping of the flight of the heron,

the oil-black cormorant’s disappear-and-dive,

shifts of sun, double or even treble rainbows.

The waterfall would be a wide white plume or a

thin silver trickle, depending …

There would be bracken’s early unfurling or

late summer’s heather pinking and purpling over, there’d be

a plague of hairy caterpillars and the last drunken bees.

Mibbe you’d nudge me, and, hushed,

again we’d watch that otter swim to shore

on New Year’s Day with a big fish in its mouth, emerge

so near us on the flat rocks we

wouldn’t dare to breathe as we’d watch it,

unconcerned, oblivious,

make a meal of eating it before our eyes.

Or it would be a late Easter this year and,

everywhere along the roadside,

the chrome-yellow straight-out-of-the-tube-and-

laid-on-with-a palette-knife brashness, the

amazing coconut smell of the gorse.

But tonight you are three months dead

and I must pull down the bed and lie in it alone.

Tomorrow, and every day in this place

these words of Sorley MacLean’s will echo through me:

The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it.

And this will not be a consolation

but a further desolation.

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

but we prefer persimmon (for

didn’t it seem the rose of

their other name

would neither taste or sound as sweet,

would be a fruit of quite

another colour?)

Such strange fruit … we bit and ate,

enjoyed.

Before we did you drew them.

– oh, you’d say, so what?

(drawing, to you, is as everyday as apples)

but I know

they’d have come and gone like Christmas

if you’d not put them down

and made them worth more than the paper

they’re inscribed on – see

those deft soft strokes of

aquamarine and white that

make our table-top lie flat, the fruits

plump out real and round and

perfectly persimmon-coloured

upon their lilac shadows in the bowl’s deep –

still life

still life, sweetheart,

in what’s already eaten and done with.

Now, looking, I can taste again.

A Handselling, 2006

1 Twenty-One-Year-Old

On our first night at Jura Lodge you say,

‘here’s a bottle of the Twenty-One-Year-Old,

hey Lizzie, let’s taste …’ and we toast

– once we’ve managed to track two nip glasses down –

‘oh there they are of course, my deah,

on the decanter tray,

mayhap, in the Music Room!’

I laugh, oh I have to, as you slosh us each

a generous inch or more of gold, yes

you gently clink your glass with mine

and we toast our good fortune and the holiday to come.

All holidays

are whole small lives lived somewhere else

and all lives consist, in part, of habits

but we don’t yet know this will be

one of the habits of this holiday –

on the long

light

nights of July

to sit astride that pair of purple velvet stools in the big

bay window of the Music Room looking out to the bay

with our

big brand-new sketch books balanced before us and

something more than twenty-one-years-old and easy-listening

playing – like old Van Morrison

predicting it’s a marvellous night for a moondance

or Dylan groaning out tangled up in blue

as I scrabble for that and every other colour, for

on the little gaming table between us

a jumble of oil pastels and coloured conté crayon

is rolling around our rested whisky glasses –

occasionally savoured and sipped from, but never refilled –

as busily, fluently, more or less silently,

we sketch and scratch away and scribble

not stopping till – late – all the last of the light is gone

and we can’t see

either what we’re drawing or the marks we’ve made.

It’ll be tomorrow

before I can enjoy the garish glad-handed sweep

you’ve made of a bit of the bay and pier and shrug

to see how hopeless was my

daft task of putting down the ever-changing sky

with its bands and streaks and shifting clouds

and almost every colour

except

sky blue.

But in spite of what

– on paper – neither of us captured

neither of us I’d bet

has ever been happier or easier with a crayon in our hands

since we were five years old –

nor less self-critical about the outcome, so

we can look at the nothing much we’ve caught

(happiness writes white said Philip Larkin) and

remember last night’s peace

and us watching the always eventful nothing happening

as the light spilled from the poolroom of the hotel

and the players’ movements went like fiddlers’ elbows,

remember how now and then one person,

sometimes joined by another, then another

might linger by the back door with a smoke

and how – till it got too dark –

you could see the laughter you were far too far away to hear.

2 Some Things I Covet in Jura Lodge

(even though my Tom finds them just a wee bit too much)

that fearsomely fantastical

armchair upstairs made entirely of antlers and deerhide like something out of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête