The Colour of Black and White is Liz Lochheads first collection of poems for more than a dozen years, and, for her, the most important since the award-winning Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems in 1984. The poems within this remarkable collection are often poems of love or death and iconic figures, Jungian archetypes, animus figures with strong outlines, harsh comfort and, often, voices of their own which dominate the first, the title, section of the book. Here you can find poems that are both autobiographical or entirely fictional set in Liz Lochheads native rural/industrial Lanarkshire. There are also poems dedicated to other poets and a section of the rude and the rhyming, the out-loud, boldly revealing Lochheads interest in unrespectable poetry, in black prison toasts, in recitations, folk-poems and music hall monologues. The colour of both the black and the white. The collaboration with the printmaker Willie Rodger was also an essential part of the making of this book. Lochhead, long an admirer of Rodgers work, felt strongly that he was a kindred spirit and his poetically pared down and essential lino cuts accentuate the positive and the negative, the black and the white.