The Colour of Black and White is Liz Lochhead's first collection of
poems for more than a dozen years, and, for her, the most important
since the award-winning Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems in
1984. The coming of a simple love lyric feels like a proof that some
vital stream hasn't dried up. These new poems are often poems of love or
death and iconic figures, Jungian archetypes, animus figures with strong
outlines, harsh comfort and, often, voices of their own dominate the
first, the 'title' section of the book. Here you can find poems
autobiographical and entirely fictional set in her native
rural/industrial Lanarkshire. Poems dedicated to other poets. There is a
section of the rude and the rhyming, the out-loud. Now she's in her
middle years she's decided to own up to this stuff properly, her
interest in 'unrespectable' poetry, in black prison 'toasts', in
recitations, folk-poems and music hall monologues. The colour of both
the black and the white. 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 strongly that he was a
kindred spirit and his poetically pared down and essential lino cuts
accentuate the positive and the negative, the black and the white.
