Stuart Kelly: Lochhead skilfully manages to be both an accessible and an enigmatic poet

Edwin Morgan was, by common consensus, the only choice for Scotland's first Makar, and there was a flurry of chatter about the field being more open for his successor.

Although there were a number of high-profile, critically acclaimed writers for the panel to choose from - Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie, Aonghas Macneacail, Douglas Dunn, John Burnside - in the end, the choice was as indisputable as Morgan: Liz Lochhead.

Lochhead skilfully manages to be both an accessible as well as an enigmatic poet. She was certainly a pioneer. She started writing at a time when Hugh MacDiarmid would declaim in Rose Street bars that "there are no Scottish female poets", and soon carved out a distinctive role as a performer and occasional provocateur.

Her earlier poems tended to be in free verse, with half-rhymes and para-rhymes like sly winks to the audience, and later collections have used full rhyme, to self-consciously comic effect, in homage to poets such as Lord Byron.

But the easy flow of her lines belies a very intense gothic preoccupation with sexuality, monstrosity and the dark myths of gender. Her poems may have a feminist agenda, but that never reduces them to mere sloganeering or propaganda; indeed, in one of her earliest collections, Memo For Spring, there is a wistfulness and sincerity.

As she says in After the Warrant Sale, she expects "not too much of love - just that it should completely solve me".

• Stuart Kelly is Books Editor of Scotland on Sunday.