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:
