As a Scottish poet, Liz Lochhead brings her heritage into her writing. She does not exclusively write about Scotland, but this looking backward is consistent through her various poems. Lochhead is a master of bending time, encompassing a simultaneous nostalgia with a re-imagining of the future all while staring at the present moment.
One stellar example in Lochhead's repertoire is "Hell for Poets." The poem recounts a specific poetry tour which goes horribly wrong. After describing the horrors of that trip, from start to finish, she includes a final stanza discussing how fortunate the experience was for Lochhead as an author. The poet thrives upon suffering, although it is painful, because it feeds the imagination. She refers to a long list of poets from Dante to Byron who have focused upon the idea of hell as a central point in their poetry.
Lochhead marries this temporal dislocation also in her poem "The Bargain." After a day hunting down treasures at a flea market in the city she and her lover repose into silence on the way home. She remembers how just a look from him used to thrill her, but now she would give anything to have him look at her again. Their emotional distance is increasing as their physical distance decreases. All at once Lochhead can see the future -- success or failure -- laid out in front of them, and she wishes to see it resolved in the present with a return to the way things used to be, in the past.
