A thing about poetic justice

Meeting Liz Lochhead. It should be the title of a poem. An eliptical, poignant little piece in which I could say: "So we talked high teas and cakestands, red buses and the astonishment of love ..."

Which we did, of course. Lochhead’s repertoire is encyclopaedic. Her past is our own: dramatic as Dracula’s cape and intimate as a shopping list; a stark montage of rainswept Scottish cities, lipsticked aunties, and the dark urgencies of human desire. Her pulse, the racing, faltering pace of a nation obsessed with identity and self-analysis.

For 25 years Lochhead has been the distinctive female voice of Scotland. Gallus, inquisitive, accusing and playful. Angry and tender by turn. She has hectored, cajoled and entertained through every possible medium and register. She once said that to get on in Scotland, as a woman, you have to have a very good relationship with your male side. That the Presbyterian tradition lacks a strong female figure and that the tragedy of Scottish women is their invisibility. If that is the case, her own body of work: nine plays and several volumes of poetry and performance pieces, must be the exception that proves the rule. For this is a strong woman. A voice impossible to ignore.

Not that she easily accepts the description. Like most Scots she is squirmingly embarrassed by compliments. When I ask her how it feels to have reached this particular place in the sun, where applause shifts towards veneration, she looks positively alarmed.

"I don’t have a weight of work. Or any reverence. It’s not based on anything. I just bugger about. I’ve been really lucky. But I’ve got to get a move on. I feel middle-aged now. Not in a bad way, but I have thought: ‘come on, for God’s sake, do some of the things you want to do’."

What she has discovered she likes to do most is, write poetry. Though her translation of the Thebans, a massive undertaking that combines two plays by Sophocles and one by Euripides, will be staged at this year’s Edinburgh Festival by Theatre Babel, it is her new collection of poems The Colour of Black and White that she discusses with greater ardour. And the usual amount of self-deprecation.

"It’s a bit slim, really," she sighs, fingering the cover of the book which represents 19 years of episodic writing. "But there’s a lot of grief in it. Love and death stuff."

The deaths are those of her mother and father, who gave her Motherwell childhood its Presbyterian probity and restraint. "My mother never had sex with anyone else except my father …" one poem, entitled Social History, begins. It concludes, "Which was a source of pride to her, being of her generation as it would have been of shame to me, being of mine." A huge undertow of nostalgia for the post-war austerity of the 1950s tugs its way through these poems, and the loss they represent. The careful lives. One of Lochhead’s greatest gifts is intimacy: the alchemy of transforming domestic detail into poignant phrase. Heartbreakingly vivid in a poem about clearing her mother’s house:

The moment she died, my mother’s dance dresses
turned from the colours they really were
to the colours I imagine them to be.
I can feel the weight of bumptoed silver shoes
swinging from their anklestraps as she swaggers
up the path towards her dad, light-headed
from airman’s kisses. Here, at what I’ll have to learn
to call my father’s house, yes every
ragbag scrap of duster prints her even more vivid
than an Ilford snapshot on some seafront
in a white cardigan and that exact frock.
Old lipstick. Liquid stockings.
Labels like Harella, Gor-ray, Berketex.
As I manhandle whole outfits into binbags for Oxfam
every mote in my eye is a utility mark
and this is useful:
the sadness of dispossessed dresses,
the decency of good coats roundshouldered
in the darkness of wardrobes,
the gravitas of lapels,
the invisible dandeers of skin fizzing off from them
like all that life that will not neatly end.

She says she considers a poem as a voice. As something heard out loud. As a child, she used to hide behind the sofa and eavesdrop on her mother chatting to friends. "I feel sorry for monoglot Oxbridge standard English speakers, because they don’t have the experience of shifting register. Being Scottish is an advantage because we all learn the posh grown-up English voice at school, then to have other registers gives you a wonderful opportunity for irony." Or as she writes in Kidspoem/Bairnsang:

it wis January
and a gey dreich day
the first day Ah went to the school
so my Mum happed me up in ma
good navy-blue napp coat wi the rid tartan hood
birled a scarf aroon ma neck
pu’ed oan ma pixie an’ ma pawkies
it was that bitter
said noo ye’ll no starve,
gie’d me a wee kiss and a kid-oan skelp oan the bum
and sent me aff across the playground
tae the place Ah’d learn to say
It was January
and a really dismal day
the first day I went to school.

Lochhead says she feels "liberated" to have this body of work off her back. She also re-edited her first book of poems, Dreaming Frankenstein, to be republished at the same time.

"That was traumatic," she confesses. "I had thought they were really poems, but reading them through again, I found them as naked and personal as any journal and sometimes painfully so. I just have to hope that the test of them will say something about growing up and growing older, particularly growing older female in a particular time and place. And that I wrote them to console me. And for fun."

She’s 55 now, and though she says she has had more fun since 50 than she had in her forties, she doesn’t disregard the anxieties of ageing. "But at least I’m thinking about getting things done. Some of my friends are thinking of retiring early and going to live in France."

Surely there is no retirement for a writer, I suggest. She sighs. "Well, that’s true. But what if the ideas go away? What if people stop employing me? I don’t have a lot of work on …" She frowns, and then, sounding exactly like the Maureen Lipman BT character who looks into her crammed fridge and tells her son that she wished he’d phoned earlier because she hasn’t got a lot in, Lochead adds that she has "two plays to write".

Two more dramas to guide past that point of terror when she always thinks it will not, cannot work. "The cracking up time," she calls it. She experienced it with the Thebans earlier this year, but fought through, of course, and is now happy with the text. "It’s very good for your soul," she says, unconvincingly. She describes Oedipus as "the best play ever written", insisting that the harrowing subject matter goes "beyond bleakness … I agree with David Mamet that ‘Tragedy is cathartic because it allows us to experience terror and awe, and frees us from their repression’."

But, she adds, she is glad she did not study English Lit at university. Or Greek for that matter. She went instead to Glasgow art school, in the fine tradition of Alasdair Gray and John Byrne.

"Going to art school’s a good thing to do for a writer. It encourages you to make things, and you don’t think it’s any big deal. A poem, a pot, you know … What you need at the beginning is courage, not inhibition."

But courage is exactly her constant companion. "I think it’s good to have had to claw your confidence out of terror and for it only to emerge now and again, and then submerge back into terror. "Fear freezes me completely. Sometimes for weeks on end … but then there’s that bit in you that just thinks: ‘F*** ’em if they can’t take a joke’."

The plus part to growing older, she says, is that she cares less what other people think. "I have no idea if people will mock this book. In a way it will upset me and in another way it won’t."

So, she’s at peace with herself? She laughs.

"Oh no. Not at all."

She is, however, at peace with her domestic life. She married 15 years ago, at the age of "39 and three quarters". Her husband Tom is an architect, but an architect who "likes colours and curves, which a lot of architects don’t". Lochhead has been described as the most "married" woman in Scotland. The epithet clearly pleases her. "Yes. I really like being married. I’ve only been married once, though I’ve lived with three different men. He’s very nice, my husband. He’s a really good friend. I like him a lot. So if he dumps me, I’ll be in trouble."

When she was approached by Radio 4 to write a "poem of celebration" for national Poetry Day, she watched the deadline approach with anxiety. "Then I thought, what do I really want to celebrate? Just the fact that, in a few hours, Tom will be home."

So she wrote: A Night In
Darling, tonight I want to celebrate
not your birthday, no, nor mine.
It’s not the anniversary of when we met,
first went to bed or got married, and the wine
is supermarket plonk. I’m just about to grate
rat-trap cheddar on the veggie bake that’ll do us fine.
But it’s far from the feast that - knowing you’ll be soon,
and suddenly so glad just to be me and here,
now, in our bright kitchen - I wish I’d stopped and gone
and shopped for, planned and savoured earlier.
Come home! It’s been a long day. Now the perfect moon
through our high window rises round and clear.

Was he flattered? Lochhead laughs. "He doesn’t say much about my poems."

Doesn’t that make writing even lonelier?

"Well, writing is lonely. Which is the nice thing about it. But I have this real luck, because I work in the theatre, too, which is the opposite of lonely - though it can be lonely to be the writer, even in the theatre. But I really like the intense sociability of a team in the theatre. When it’s good, it’s really terrific."

She also teaches - an MPhil class in creative writing at Glasgow University, countless seminars, theatre workshops and, most recently, a two-week stint as writer in residence at Eton College.

Where?

Yes. Eton. She heaves with laughter at my astonishment. Liz Lochhead and Eton go together like sardines and ice-cream.

"The boys were really nice. Very enthusiastic," she smiles. "And polite."

And very well-dressed?

"That too."

She is convinced that teaching creative writing is less about teaching structure and the mechanics of writing, than about teaching the confidence to ignore these things when necessary.

"I remember talking to Raymond Carver, who had a very pressured, chaotic domestic life and could only snatch an afternoon or a few hours here and there to write. He thought that the way he did things was his guilty secret until he read Flannery O’Connor saying: ‘I did not know that the Bible salesman was going to steal the woman’s wooden leg until the paragraph before he stole it’.

"That’s how it is for all of us. It happens as you’re doing it. We’re all flying by the seat of our pants. That’s the most important thing I can teach."

She pauses, then adds: "Though not according to my husband. ‘Stop trying to educate the world!’ is what Tom says."

To the woman who re-introduced us to Medea and Miseryguts, Mary Queen of Scots, and Dracula, I’d say: " Some chance."

• The Colour of Black and White is published by Polygon, £8.99.