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Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

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My custom week is the writer Liz Lockhead. Poetry and plays and prose have flowed from her pen

for nine on forty-five years. A story teller at heart, she writes she says for consolation and for fun.

We read it and hear it and enjoy it. For the fresh distinction she brings to the everyday

business of life. From warrant sales to serial monogamy, her eye and ear capture moments and

moods with considerable craft and heart and humour. Her use of the vernacular ties her unmistakably

to Scotland. Indeed, she spent five years as its national poet. But in truth, her life has

ranged far and wide. Canada, Turkey, America and England have at times been her home.

She says of her poems they seem as naked and as intimate as any journal and sometimes painfully so.

So welcome, Liz Lockhead. You did say that. You're at that stage now in your life and also by

reputation where you do collected works and that must necessitate you looking back and reading

and analysing the stuff from your early years of writing. Going back through your life,

through your work, what's the sensation? What does that feel like? It feels very strange,

sometimes you find things getting ready for this programme. You sometimes find things that you

can't remember and they come back very sharply to you as if you'd never written them or never

connected with them in that way. But it makes me realise that all the time I have been mediating

my life through making pictures with words. I think they're quite visual. I hope they're quite

...