Description
Reverberating with risk, this collection negotiates the darkness of injury, the potency and pain of revelation, and agency as song.
In three sequences, Richard Scott documents what it is to have survived ‘seismic assaults, the buried silences’. The first is a gallery of still-life paintings, controlled arrangements of frozen time. ‘Coy’ then breaks apart Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and repurposes its lexicon to enact the collapse of language under the strain of scalding direct statement. Finally, in the luminous title sequence, crystals and gemstones evoke fracture and fixative, demonstrating Scott’s power as a poet to cast an uncompromising but ultimately uplifting light: ‘For years I had no sound but his sweetness, his lye. /Thus I go slow. I song last. Least. The lower. /That which I had nor sound I may still song’.
Praise for Soho:
‘Scott’s project is as political as it is personal, and the kaleidoscopic picture of contemporary queerness he builds through these poems is as urgent as it is alluring.’ A. K. Blakemore, Poetry London
‘With his electric Soho, Richard Scott has arrived like a lightning bolt in our midst. In poetry that moves so fast we’re left breathless, this is protean, irreverent, urgent work.’ Sinéad Morrissey, T. S. Eliot Prize judge
‘Richard Scott’s Soho is the most gripping portrayal of queer lives I’ve read so far.’ Daljit Nagra, Guardian
