That Broke Into Shining Crystals

Reverberating with risk, this collection negotiates the darkness of injury, the potency and pain of revelation, and agency as song.

Trauma and vulnerability - violation and its aftershock - are explored within a framework of self-determination and radical queerness in Richard Scott’s second collection. In three distinct yet interlocking parts, he documents what it is to have survived ’seismic assaults, the buried silences’. This is first pursued through still-life paintings: controlled arrangements in which time is frozen. In ’Coy’, the lexicon of Andrew Marvell’s ’To His Coy Mistress’ is repurposed to enact the collapse of language under the pressure of description. In the luminous title sequence, crystals and gemstones evoke themes of fracture and fixative, demonstrating Scott’s power as a poet who casts an uncompromising but ultimately uplifting light.

Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His debut collection, Soho (Faber), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Polari First Book Prize. He teaches poetry at the Faber Academy and is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.