David Scott is an ex-Warden of the Winchester Diocese School of Spirituality, and a translator and editor of, amongst other things, Lancelot Andrewes. He’s also written on what he describes as a ‘family’ of spiritual writers, including Andrewes, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan and Traherne. In the volume under review, he also writes poems ‘On Not Knowing R.S. Thomas’, on David Jones, and on James Fenton’s father, Canon John Fenton, a noted New Testament authority and Canon of Christ Church Oxford. I would imagine that he would also like mentioned his poems on Winston Churchill, Gertrude Jekyll and Sappho! But others have called him a priest-poet in the tradition of Herbert, and that doesn’t seem like such a bad starting point.
In his book, Moments of Prayer, Scott writes, ‘Inevitably at times words fail us, but the minister is often called upon to put into words what no one else can. The poet accomplishes this in words, the minister does it very often in the faltering words of human experience’. There’s a certain tension in this utterance; on the one hand, Scott seems certain that the poet actually does ‘accomplish’ the rendering of experience into words, on the other hand, Scott seems to suggest that the minister is the verbally more fallible of the two. It is true of Scott’s poetry that there is a quiet confidence in the utterance. He usually employs simple tenses, past and present, in his writing and his verbs are seldom modified with ‘might’ or ‘could’ or ‘may’. On John Fenton, Scott writes, ‘The outer life is burned or buried on a particular date,/ but faith flies away from there, to become something/ suddenly other. No one I know has been so firm on that.’ What’s interesting here is that amongst the ‘no ones’ is clearly Scott himself. And what the ‘something/ suddenly other’ might be, the ‘that’ which so emphatically ends the poem, is carefully open to interpretation. Thus, Scott’s minister/poet tension comes alive in his writings on humans and the human condition. Fenton’s firm belief is opened into something far less firm and which might not extend beyond Canon Fenton himself.
Scott is definitely a poet of the epiphany and his usually understated mode lays these moments open for the readers’ careful absorption. In the particularly lovely, ‘Abbey Ruins’, he writes, ‘this afternoon I saw three girls/ slip their links of iron, and/ move in sacred space like dancers./ They were unopposed by altar, door,/ or roof. One smoothed the stone/ as if it was a face. They walked/ their full height with natural flair./ The ruin, like a shell cracked open, lay/ aghast at their experiment with air.’ But Scott is also capable of deft narrative, as in his series of ‘Priest’ poems from his 1998 Selected. In these, Scott recounts the small incidents from a parish priest’s life and makes them luminous with common, almost secular, humanity. In ‘A Priest at the Crematorium’, it is the sight of women in saris, ‘catching and releasing the sun’, which offers hope and grace. Elsewhere, he is capable of creating his own parables, as in ‘Ibn Abbad woke early’. In this the muslim, the Rabbi and the monk go to paradise and are served by ‘a little Nazarene’.
A gathering such as this will bring any fan some disappointments and Scott has been particularly hard on his previous book Piecing Together. From that volume I missed the lovely little poem ‘The Barnes Home Guard Ground’. And the ‘Gertrude Jekyll’s Lindesfarne Garden’ in this volume is completely different from the poem of the same name in Piecing Together, different and perhaps … not so good?
Scott is that much abused thing, a ‘national treasure’. Thus there is an Englishness about these poems which is defiantly not Little Englandism; Scott is ‘catholic’ in the original meaning of the term as ‘universal’. Perhaps there is another poet-priest waiting in the wings to take up the baton, but at the moment David Scott speaks with a quiet eloquence of which Herbert would have surely have approved.
Ian Pople