David Scott is an ex-Warden of the Winchester Diocese School of Spirituality, and a translator and editor of, amongst other things, Lancelot Andrewes.\u00a0 He\u2019s also written on what he describes as a \u2018family\u2019 of spiritual writers, including Andrewes, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan and Traherne.\u00a0 In the volume under review, he also writes poems \u2018On Not Knowing R.S. Thomas\u2019, on David Jones, and on James Fenton\u2019s father, Canon John Fenton, a noted New Testament authority and Canon of Christ Church Oxford.\u00a0 I would imagine that he would also like mentioned his poems on Winston Churchill, Gertrude Jekyll and Sappho!\u00a0 But others have called him a priest-poet in the tradition of Herbert, and that doesn\u2019t seem like such a bad starting point.<\/p>\n
In his book, Moments of Prayer, <\/i>Scott writes, \u2018Inevitably at times words fail us, but the minister is often called upon to put into words what no one else can.\u00a0 The poet accomplishes this in words, the minister does it very often in the faltering words of human experience\u2019. There\u2019s a certain tension in this utterance;\u00a0 on the one hand, Scott seems certain that the poet actually does \u2018accomplish\u2019 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.\u00a0 It is true of Scott\u2019s 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 \u2018might\u2019 or \u2018could\u2019 or \u2018may\u2019. On John Fenton, Scott writes, \u2018The 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.\u2019 What\u2019s interesting here is that amongst the \u2018no ones\u2019 is clearly Scott himself. And what the \u2018something\/ suddenly other\u2019 might be, the \u2018that\u2019 which so emphatically ends the poem, is carefully open to interpretation.\u00a0 Thus, Scott\u2019s minister\/poet tension comes alive in his writings on humans and the human condition. Fenton\u2019s firm belief is opened into something far less firm and which might not extend beyond Canon Fenton himself.<\/p>\n
Scott is definitely a poet of the epiphany and his usually understated mode lays these moments open for the readers\u2019 careful absorption.\u00a0 In the particularly lovely, \u2018Abbey Ruins\u2019, he writes, \u2018this 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.\u2019 But Scott is also capable of deft narrative, as in his series of \u2018Priest\u2019 poems from his 1998 Selected. <\/i>In these, Scott recounts the small incidents from a parish priest\u2019s life and makes them luminous with common, almost secular, humanity. In \u2018A Priest at the Crematorium\u2019, it is the sight of women in saris, \u2018catching and releasing the sun\u2019, which offers hope and grace. \u00a0Elsewhere, he is capable of creating his own parables, as in \u2018Ibn Abbad woke early\u2019.\u00a0 In this the muslim, the Rabbi and the monk go to paradise and are served by \u2018a little Nazarene\u2019.<\/p>\n
A gathering such as this will bring any fan some disappointments and Scott has been particularly hard on his previous book Piecing Together<\/i>.\u00a0 From that volume I missed the lovely little poem \u2018The Barnes Home Guard Ground\u2019.\u00a0 And the \u2018Gertrude Jekyll\u2019s Lindesfarne Garden\u2019 in this volume is completely different from the poem of the same name in Piecing Together, <\/i>different and perhaps \u2026 not so good?<\/p>\n
Scott is that much abused thing, a \u2018national treasure\u2019. Thus there is an Englishness about these poems which is defiantly not Little Englandism; Scott is \u2018catholic\u2019 in the original meaning of the term as \u2018universal\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 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.
\n
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Scott is an ex-Warden of the Winchester Diocese School of Spirituality, and a translator and editor of, amongst other things, Lancelot Andrewes.\u00a0 He\u2019s also written on what he describes as a \u2018family\u2019 of spiritual writers, including Andrewes, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan and Traherne.\u00a0 In the volume under review, he also writes poems \u2018On Not Knowing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n