Laura Scott’s poetry is clear, illuminating yet not uncomplicated: there is a mystery at its edges, a recognition of how life slips away, unbiddable, non-compliant. In Email – involving two rooms with a view – the challenge in responding to the email that makes up the first half of the poem encompasses, one guesses, a greater and unexplored difficulty beyond how the leaves or branches or sky are behaving. The poem’s question “So how do I reply?” underpins much of her writing, a chastening self-doubt that contributes to her attractive power as a poet.
Scott’s wonderful debut, So Many Rooms, established her as a devotee of Russian literature – especially Tolstoy. And here, again, she honours literature as a living presence and shows how what we read plaits itself into how we live. The Fourth Sister is a homage to Chekhov (Scott is, if I have understood her correctly, one of three sisters herself). The fourth sister, the one Chekhov did not write about, becomes a receptacle for all that haunts her. The title poem is like a bell that cannot toll:
unsung unrung undone
is that me? (oh God) is that me?
Desperate and unwritten, a fourth sister is eventually released: “the one who slips / the story’s collar”. Desperation is, throughout, offset by wit. In a delightful, unrhymed sonnet, Short Story, she imagines Chekhov “terrified / of being saddled with a bore for a travelling companion” anticipating a long journey and spreading the rumour that he is “a drunk and a swindler, a nihilist actually, and, to crown it all / in a final audacious swap, a bore”. She concludes: “it worked”.
“Bore” turns out to be the deadliest slur of all – swiftest of repellants. And using the word “boredom” or “boring” or “bore” is fascinatingly high risk. Speak the words and you feel – as a reflex – bored. There are writers who get away with it. Beckett created rapt boredom in Waiting for Godot, Baudelaire raged against ennui, but it was Chekhov who, more than any other writer, saw boredom as part of the human soul.
Scott recognises boredom, too, without dastardly effect. Indeed, in the quirkily successful The Bored Cowboy, it is the cowboy’s boredom (he is a symbolic figure) that turns out to be enabling. As he becomes more idle, she becomes more fully present as she listens to a blackbird’s song:
as if the cowboy
who slinks in
every day and leans
against the wall
stringing his rope
with trinkets and worries
and spinning it
in a hoop around me
got bored
and dropped it
to the ground
so there was nothing
between me and the sound
Another poem, The Boring King, unfolds like a fragile fairytale and recalls “My bleak father – the King… and us the three princesses / who fell asleep the moment you began to speak”. And in the beautiful flight of fancy Still Life, she imagines a life as a blown glass before making an agreeably unexpected switch to imagining life as a blown beach towel in which, again, boredom is acknowledged alongside the rest:
That moment
when it’s shaking off its sand and stretching out in front of you,
the raggy sprawl of a life, your life blown into shape,
the wrong turns and longing of it, the stillness and speed of it held
there in the air, the arcs of joy and lack of meaning in it,
the boredom and loves of it, the long beautiful beat of it.
Chekhov once wrote: “The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.” It is not a mistake Scott ever makes.
• The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott is published by Carcanet (£11.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Email by Laura Scott
He told me what he saw out of his window –
a bay tree with a glow on it, maybe from a fire
in a neighbour’s garden, some bird
dotting, and then clinging to a lilac bush,
and a sky that wanted to be blue – and the words sparked
and flickered as if they were a trail to something. So how do I
reply?
My window only shows the sky
and branches spanning like a hand
into a stretch and anyway there’s a square of gauze hanging
in front of it with its own sewn pattern
of branches and leaves. But today
with the sky so blue, so blatant and all those branches
doing their thing – yes. Tell him that.
