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Collected Poems
Collected poems of British-born Tasmanian poet Margaret Scott
174 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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January 14, 2026
Collected Poems contains most (but not quite all!) of the British-Tasmanian poet/academic/critic Margaret Scott's poems from her previous published collections Tricks of Memory: Poems (1980), Visited (1983) and The Black Swans (1988), together with a number of more recent poems grouped together under the title Renovations. Scott died in 2005, but is fondly remembered in the Tasmanian literary and academic community, as well as by viewers of the popular ABC television quiz show Good News Week, on which she was a frequent guest.
It took me several months to read through the entire volume of Collected Poems, as I took my time to consider and absorb each poem as I went. The themes range from Scott's childhood memories from wartime UK, to domestic vignettes of her life in Tasmania, to her reflections on the death of her long-time partner Michael Scott, to the joys and challenges of motherhood and grand-motherhood, to the haunting history of Tasmania's indigenous people. There are frequent allusions to classical mythology, ancient writings, and the landscape of Scott's beloved Tasman Peninsula, in Tasmania's south-east, where she lived in the later year of her life. There's a dark tone to many of the poems, as Scott probes some of the more challenging aspects of the human condition - social dislocation, unhappy relationships and grief and longing for people and places. Scott had the gift of making the mundane magical, of capturing long-past events with a frank poignancy and of making startlingly accurate observations on human experience.
Some of my favourites from the collection are:
The Escape, which overlays the famous convict escape from the Port Arthur Penal Settlement in 1839 with the Homer's tale of the Odyssey.
Return to Pirates Bay Tasmania, 1974
Housework, a series of verses about everyday aspects of Scott's domestic life - I particularly liked the final part, "Taking Cuttings", as it's something that I do myself!
I'm glad to have read this collection, and (having read a library copy on frequent renewal), I've now sourced a copy of the out-of-print volume so that I can re-read several of the poems at my leisure.
It took me several months to read through the entire volume of Collected Poems, as I took my time to consider and absorb each poem as I went. The themes range from Scott's childhood memories from wartime UK, to domestic vignettes of her life in Tasmania, to her reflections on the death of her long-time partner Michael Scott, to the joys and challenges of motherhood and grand-motherhood, to the haunting history of Tasmania's indigenous people. There are frequent allusions to classical mythology, ancient writings, and the landscape of Scott's beloved Tasman Peninsula, in Tasmania's south-east, where she lived in the later year of her life. There's a dark tone to many of the poems, as Scott probes some of the more challenging aspects of the human condition - social dislocation, unhappy relationships and grief and longing for people and places. Scott had the gift of making the mundane magical, of capturing long-past events with a frank poignancy and of making startlingly accurate observations on human experience.
Some of my favourites from the collection are:
The Escape, which overlays the famous convict escape from the Port Arthur Penal Settlement in 1839 with the Homer's tale of the Odyssey.
Return to Pirates Bay Tasmania, 1974
Housework, a series of verses about everyday aspects of Scott's domestic life - I particularly liked the final part, "Taking Cuttings", as it's something that I do myself!
I'm glad to have read this collection, and (having read a library copy on frequent renewal), I've now sourced a copy of the out-of-print volume so that I can re-read several of the poems at my leisure.
Displaying 1 of 1 review