A Handsel: New and Collected Poems

Liz Lochhead is one of the country’s leading poets. Her work has paved the way and inspired some of the most inspirational voices writing in Scotland today, including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy.

In A Handsel, the first new poems from Scotland’s second modern Makar since 2016’s Fugitive Colours, the poet celebrates people and those small momentous moments that encapsulate so much of her work. It is human relationships that sit at the heart of these poems; each one is a beautifully realised snapshot that explores the poet’s past, her friendships and revisits favourite characters from earlier collections. This landmark publication collects for the first time the poetry of Liz Lochhead.

Bringing work back into print, this collected poems publishes all of the poet’s collections, presented in their entirety: Memo for Spring, Islands, The Grimm Sisters, Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black and White and Fugitive Colours, as well as poems from Bagpipe Muzak and True Confessions.

Liz Lochhead is the Scottish Makar (Poet Laureate) and is regarded as one of Scotland's best andmost popular poets and dramatists. Her poetry is characterised by a self-conscious effort to mimic the idioms of speech, adopting a range of spoken styles that include the lyrical use of cliche, rap, colloquialism and even advertising language in an effort to raise the profile of the marginalised voices of both Scots and women. Her most famous poetry collections include "Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems" (1984), "True Confessions and New Cliches" (1985) and"Bagpipe Muzak" (1991). She became Makar in 2011 after the death of Edwin Morgan."