Memo for Spring E-Book

Liz Lochhead

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

Seitenzahl: 52

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This is an exclusive limited edition with a preface by Liz Lochhead and a new introduction by Ali Smith. Liz Lochhead is one of the leading poets writing in Britain today. This, her debut collection, published in 1972, was a landmark publication. Writing at a time when the landscape of Scottish poetry was male dominated, hers was a new voice, tackling subjects that resonated with readers – as it still does. Her poetry paved the way, and inspired, countless new voices including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. Still writing and performing today, fifty years on from her first book of poetry, Liz Lochhead has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and was Scotland's second modern Makar, succeeding Edwin Morgan. Memo for Spring is accessible, vital and always as honest as it is hopeful. Driving through this collection are themes of pain, acceptance, loss and triumph.

Leseprobe

MEMO FOR SPRING

This paperback edition published in Great Britainin 2022 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh EH9 1QS

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Liz Lochhead, 1972, 2022

Introduction © Ali Smith, 2022

First published in 1972 by Reprographia.

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

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.

ISBN 978 1 84697 610 0

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78885 348 4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset in Verdigris MVB by Polygon, Edinburgh

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

In memory of my husband, Tom Logan

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction Ali Smith

Revelation

Poem for Other Poor Fools

How Have I Been

On Midsummer Common

Fragmentary

The Visit

After a Warrant Sale

Phoenix

Daft Annie on Our Village Mainstreet

Obituary

Morning After

Inventory

Grandfather’s Room

For My Grandmother Knitting

Something I’m Not

Poem on a Day Trip

Overheard by a Young Waitress

Notes on the Inadequacy of a Sketch

Letter from New England

Getting Back

Box Room

Song for Coming Home

George Square

Man on a Bench

Carnival

Cloakroom

The Choosing

Homilies from Hospital

Object

Wedding March

Riddle-Me-Ree

Memo to Myself for Spring

PREFACE

The photograph and title on the cover of this book are the same ones from the cover of my first collection of poems fifty years ago (fifty, jeez-o!) way back in 1972. In a very different time. Now here it is, this new fiftieth anniversary edition. A rare and amazing honour. And don’t I know it.

The girl in that photograph simply wouldn’t have believed this could possibly be happening. Well, when you’re twenty-four you don’t really think you’ll be around in fifty years. Nor that you’d want to be.

I remember that I wasn’t too sure about either title or cover at the time, but Gordon Wright, who published it (back then he was running the one-man-band independent, Edinburgh-based imprint Reprographia, specialising in poetry) definitely was. He and Norman MacCaig convinced me – and they must have been getting something right. It hit a nerve, this first wee book of mine. Changed my life, too.

I look so demure, though, with those downcast eyes, and I wasn’t ever that. And, in black and white, sweeter-looking, bonnier by far than I was in real life. I remember a distinguished Scottish critic telling me how, from seeing the cover of the book, how much he had fancied me before he’d ever met me and how disappointed he was when he actually did. Although even at the time I, silently, gave him nothing-out-of-ten for his non-chat-up line and for his quite un-askedfor honesty, I just thought ‘fair enough really’, and didn’t bother (well, in those days it just wouldn’t have been done) to tell him he would have had no chance anyway, I didn’t fancy him either. So much for my career as a cover-girl.

Opening, in search of the girl who was not quite that girl on the cover, one of the four or five copies of Memo for Spring I still have on my shelves now – and I haven’t opened one in quite a while – I find, behind the romantic packaging and the no-spine notebook-style binding, a scant thirty-two of the first things she had written and considered finished.

A few of them are very slight, song-like slightly melancholic love, and out-of-love, lyrics (well, I went to Glasgow School of Art from 1965–1970, where, as I always say, I specialised in Drawing and Painting and unrequited love) but more than half of the poems in here can still surprise me with their freshness and directness. Especially the ones which have caught something of that particular time, that place, the coal bing scarred industrial landscape with its red-sky-at-night of Motherwell’s Ravenscraig blast-furnaces and the characters that belonged to that Lanarkshire mining village with its new-build, post-war, nineteen-fifties housing scheme attached to it, and the family I grew up in. And was putting behind me – she’s leaving home – as I wrote.

Was I aware of that at the time? I’m not sure, but I do remember that this impulse to write these things had come from who knows where? And initially was not connected to any ambition or desire to see them in print; was always to me something that was all-my-own, my freedom. Simple as that.

Fundamentally I think to this day I feel exactly the same – ageless, genderless, free – whenever, prompted by some already existing quirk of language that’s irking me, coupled with some as-yet wordless ghost of an idea, I can get going on something no one has asked me to write, something without deadline or purpose.

I still relish more than anything in my life that precious, and devoid of loneliness, alone-ness.

But I couldn’t begin now to write the things the girl on the cover wrote then. Couldn’t write with the careless confidence she had. She and I are in many ways quite different people. How could we not be after fifty years? Life goes past so very quickly, and, as the old will tell the young, the paradox is – with, on the surface, less happening in your life – weirdly, time does seem to keep on ever-accelerating, really does go faster the older you get. Even if you get the full three-score-and-ten, life is so short. And yet there are so many interestingly different bits to it. You’d never run out of things to write about.

How did the publication of Memo for Spring come about?

It wasn’t something I strove for. I’m sorry to say I didn’t have the manuscript of a collection of poems ready that I was sending out to publishers, stoically collecting rejection slips and doggedly finding another address of another possible publisher in The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook