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“... that are many centuries old. From the generation of James Macpherson to that of Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead, these poets are increasingly aware of coming from a heteroglot culture, whose words could be both familiar and foreign. This awareness is heightened today, when only some sixty thousand Scots speak Gaelic and when so many non-Gaelic speaking ...”

“... no way can the words be taken as a ‘voice’ from the past, for they can never have been spoken. Liz Lochhead on lodging with relatives has the rhythms of spoken speech. It is not the village Hampdens of Scottish life that we need from the more distant past but the township Liz Lochheads. It is no criticism of the ...”

“... her and grass growing on her face. But for its quietism, this is the sort of image to appeal to Liz Lochhead. She is drawn to larger-than-life mythic figures, giants and ogres, Frankenstein and Rapunzstiltskin. And, like Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber, she seeks to revise ‘male’ fairy-tales and legends, and to celebrate the subversiveness of ...”

“... as good as on the mantelpiece’: but this is poetry and Butlin is destined to fluff the chance.) Liz Lochhead is a gutsier talent, but the songs, raps and satires in True Confessions, a selection of her stage revues, hit predictable targets and predictable rhymes. Peter Davidson is something else again, a poet seeking consciously to revive the ...”

“... woman, is quietly accurate, suggesting hidden depths of embarrassment, determination and snobbery. Liz Lochhead, whose work Duffy’s resembles in more ways than one, and who is arguably more adept at representing the complex implications and implicatures in people’s speech, achieves a similar effect in her poem ‘Homilies from Hospital’, in which a ...”

“... of the old put-down, ‘THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.’ The title poem and several others have learned from Liz Lochhead how to present a public female Scottish voice that rounds on gender-packaging. Poems mix Scots and English easily, unaffectedly, and the volume contains poetry entirely in Scots. Just as language is confidently impure, so lyricism and public ...”