Liz Lochhead was bom in Motherwell in 1947, she trained at Glasgow School of Art, and when she was twenty-four published Memo for Spring, her first and most personally reminiscent collection of poems, which sold nearly 5,000 copies. Since 1972 she has become one of Scotland's most significant and prolific writers, whose work is distinguished by its protean character. Often defying generic classification, it works within and across boundaries of poetry, prose, drama and film. Her style is marked by two political features: it is fundamentally transgressive and it is also popular. Formal transgression, a refusal to sit squarely as ‘poetry’, ‘drama’, or even ‘rap’ - let alone divisions within these categories such as ‘ballad’, or ‘lyric’ - is matched by a provocative tone of ironic feminism. This allows Lochhead to move into what has been predominantly male territory, at the same time permitting a negotiation with rank-and-file feminist politics. The popularity of her work is just as complex. Her vocabulary, whether literary or theatrical, contains the demotic, taking particular strength from spoken idiom. Sensitivity to regional varieties of contemporary Scots, English and American goes hand in hand with a subject-matter that draws on topics of current political debate, folk history and pop culture. Capable of sounding an intimate, unpretentious voice, her work is that of one woman speaking to many, and one person speaking for many. Poetry readings, revue work, and more formal performances (Verena in Quelques Fleurs for both stage (1991) and radio (1992), and Pemelle in Tartuffe (1994) which she also directed at the Edinburgh Festival before transferring to the Glasgow Mayfest in 1995) permit a direct (if ‘in personae’) relationship with her audience. Participation in cultural activity that is not accorded the status of ‘high’ art, yet which addresses in variously crafted media matters of personal and political concern for a wide audience, is a significant dimension to her work as a writer.

An early example of the transgressive and popular dimensions of her work is provided by the poem ‘Morning After’ contained in Memo for Spring (1972). The title itself proclaims the popular idiom on which the poem depends. Predictable lament is yoked with lyrical intensity so that where the reader expects cliché she finds sincerity, generated by the verb ‘I shiver’ and its position in the blank verse.