Liz Lochhead

This is the weekend of the Dunoon Book Festival, an excellent innovation now  its second year and driven forward by the good independent book shop in Dunoon, Bookpoint. 

As part of the opening day programme last night I  was "in conversation" with Liz Lochhead in the Studio Cinema in Dunoon in front of an interested and enthusiastic audience.  I took a number of pictures but this one, of Liz just before we started, was in my view the image that shows   best her humanity, good humour and intelligence - all characteristics of her poetry and drama which she reads and talks about with infectious  entertaining energy.  

One of things we discuss was another picture of her , the famous one taken by Gordon Wright for the front of her first book of poems, Memo for Spring ( an image of which I have included as an extra photo on this page).   The book was published in 1972 by Gordon after he heard her read at a poetry reading  featuring Norman MacCaig.    Memo for Spring sold 5000 copies , an incredible amount for  poetry and established her as  a significant voice in Scotland and further afield. 

She finished the evening with two extraordinary memorable items - her poem "Barinsang" and that wonderfully powerful opening speech from "Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off" which she delivers with passion, wit and more more than a little menace and which  includes this :

'National bird: the crow, the corbie, le corbeau, moi! How me? Eh? Eh? Eh? Voice like a choked laugh. Ragbag o' a burd in ma black duds, a' angles and elbows and broken oxter feathers, black beady een in ma executioner’s hood. No braw, but Ah think Ah ha’e a sort of black glamour.’