Wound

by Richard Scott

Suppose you could travel back, in the obscure regions of memory, to the origin of desire? For Richard Scott, and perhaps for all of us, that beginning point is a wound – an occasion of harm, a lack – that forever after shapes our sense of what it is to want. For the martyred saints on display in the parish church, “devotion is a perpetual hurt.” Scott’s poems chronicle violation – in the van of the unforgettable fishmonger among “the stopped hearts of bivalves pickled in brine/…resting on clouds of ice,” or at the hands of the butcher’s apprentice: “Oh to be your prey!/ Hang me up…” Brave and aching poems, yes, but not merely so; Scott’s resonant language veers between the plain and the rapturous, testifying to the persistence, no matter what, of pleasure.
Mark Doty

Genres: Poetry

34 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Richard Scott grew up in London and studied at the Royal College of Music and at Goldsmiths College. After working as an opera singer and presenting The Opera Hour on Resonance FM, Richard went on to win the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and become a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry mentee, a member of the Aldeburgh 8 and an Open Spaces artist resident at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem ‘crocodile’ won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho is his first book and took ten years to write.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw and intense.

[anna marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the first half of this collection somewhat over bearing in its sadistic imagery but after beheading of a female Saint it for much better. I thought the poem permission and also admission where particularly good and I connected with them