{"id":9304,"date":"2018-05-02T22:32:31","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T21:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9304"},"modified":"2018-05-02T22:32:54","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T21:32:54","slug":"richard-scott-soho-reviewed-by-nell-osborne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9304","title":{"rendered":"Richard Scott, Soho<\/em>, reviewed by Nell Osborne"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Scott | Soho<\/em> | Faber & Faber<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Richard Scott\u2019s debut poetry book, Soho<\/em>, comes after his pamphlet Wound<\/em> won the 2016 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Whilst reading it on the bus, I overheard a woman tell her friend that she hopes her baby son will \u2018turn out gay\u2019 so they can \u2018watch Ru Paul\u2019s Drag Race together.\u2019 Queerness has never been more socially \u2018acceptable\u2019, but Soho<\/em> is not a celebration of gay freedom or equality or acceptance per se. It leans hard into the shame that corporate, family-friendly or normatively affirmative representations of gay identity and culture often ignore or sanitise. As the speaker notes in \u2018[you spit in my mouth and I]\u2019, \u2018the opposite of shame is not pride.\u2019 Between the hot-pink book covers of Soho<\/em>, intimacy is double edged. Insecurity haunts a desire for erotic abandonment, complicity troubles memory, the intensity of delight weighs against the threat of violence. <\/p>\n

In the final, long poem \u2018Oh My Soho!\u2019, the speaker writes \u2018I am to be a homo-historian \u2013 \/ mean to turn Biogrope to biography, foreskin to forebearer.\u2019 Biogrope was the nickname given to the Biograph cinema that functioned as a sanctuary for the clandestine trysts of its male patrons, until it was demolished in 1983. Scott\u2019s unyielding poetic eye acts as homo-historian not only of place but of the sensual body, re-materialising the legacy of gay desire and vulnerability, which, much like the Biograph and many parts of Soho in general, have been razed. <\/p>\n

In \u2018[like to go walking]\u2019, Scott confronts the desperate longing and loneliness that forcibly accompanied the sexual desires of many gay men.<\/p>\n

remember those pre-grindr days
\nwhen loneliness stung like a hunger
\nand you wanted to give yourself away like a milk tooth<\/p>\n

Scott\u2019s poetic language playfully luxuriates in the anal eroticism that has, historically, been relegated to the blink-and-you-miss-it territory of euphemism and metaphor. <\/p>\n

follow me home and I will open my
\nwalls for you tonight I want
\nyour lidless your lidless eye your pearly hum<\/p>\n

wash my beard with translucence
\ntransmute my skin to semi-precious metal
\nenter my mouth my anus with light <\/p>\n

Soho<\/em> is a hyper-sexualised exhibition of vulnerability and trauma, at once violent and tender. Scott combines a uniquely verdant lyricism with his precise, excoriating, wit. Fans already familiar with Scott\u2019s work might be shocked by the new permutations of this collection. This includes the citation of ideas by queer theorists such as Eve Kofosky Sedgwick and Leo Bersani. However, these academic encounters lack the affective nuance of poems such as \u2018Fishmonger\u2019 or \u2018four arias.\u2019 The tonal register too, slides between earnest confessional and ribald play. This makes for a dizzying, and sometimes jarring, progression. Nonetheless, I found myself unfastened by this aspect of Soho<\/em> (not by its experimentation with affront), but by the discomforting force of its confessional provocation. It reminds me of the anxieties that were raised in the wake of the MeToo movement that saw survivors of sexual violence undertake public acts of self-nomination en masse. What does it mean to speak of shame? How much speaking is too much? <\/p>\n

Even to articulate the shameful thing is to feel oneself shamed by it. In \u201cCrocodile\u201d, which won the Poetry London prize 2017, the speaker reflects upon being raped by a predator \u2018who held me from behind \/ when I didn\u2019t know sex\u2019:<\/p>\n

well pity me the boy who cried
\ncrocodile I have these moments when I
\nknow I wanted it asked for it even
\nto be special to be scarred<\/p>\n

The autobiographical potential of these poems is played out compulsively, as a highly productive and volatile thematic fault line. In \u2018Permissions\u2019, the speaker probes into his viscerally-felt sense of impropriety. \u2018I am always writing my pamphlet of abuse poems.\u2019 One poem is playfully entitled \u2018in the style of Richard Scott.\u2019 In \u2018Admission\u2019, \u2018he asks if my poems are authentic \/ do I have experience in the matter.\u2019 Scott flirts provocatively with the borderlines of \u2018the obscene\u2019; not only with what can or cannot be said, but in which voice and what manner or mood. <\/p>\n

Representing violence can be difficult because, in part, the listener is unwilling to believe in it (to go there). These poems secrete a palpable anger, as in ‘[even if you fuck me all vanilla in]’ where the speaker says ‘we are still dangerous faggots’. Asking us to remain with, even to interrogate, our own feelings of discomfort, Soho makes for powerful, urgent and deeply relevant reading. <\/p>\n

by Nell Osborne<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Scott | Soho | Faber & Faber Richard Scott\u2019s debut poetry book, Soho, comes after his pamphlet Wound won the 2016 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. 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