Fugitive Colours

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.'



Poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell in 1947. After studying at Glasgow School of Art she taught at art schools in Glasgow and Bristol while working on her poetry. She is a Fellow of Glasgow School of Art, an Honorary Doctor of Letters of Glasgow University, a Fellow of RSAMD and of Glasgow Institute of Art, and is an Honorary President of the Scottish Poetry Library. Her poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, 1984), True Confessions and New Cliches (Polygon, 1985), Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991), The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 (Polygon, 2003) and A Choosing: Selected Poems (Polygon, 2011). Her plays include MTartuffe (Polygon, 1986), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (Penguin, 1989) and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award-winning Medea (Nick Hern Books, 2000).



'An inspirational presence in British poetry - funny, feisty, female, full of feeling' -



'Human relationships, especially as seen from a woman's point of view, are central: attraction, pain, acceptance, loss, triumphs and deceptions, habits and surprises; always made immediate through a storyteller's concrete detail of place or voice or object or colour remembered or imagined'



'This is the work of a highly intelligent, sensitive, perceptive, and humorous young woman ... Behind the brilliant display of fireworks, and the wry laughter, and the lyricism, there is a deal of pain'



'One of the few poets writing today capable of encompassing the matter of contemporary life in terms that are both attractive and thought provoking'



'The social satires in Liz Lochhead's new collection are among the wittiest and most original pieces she has written'