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The Fourth Sister
A The Telegraph Book of the Year. Laura Scott's second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book's energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth's sense: 'an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.'
Book Details
- Publisher: Carcanet Press
- Publish Date: Apr 27th, 2023
- Pages: 72
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.30in - 0.60in - 0.45lb
- EAN: 9781800173057
- Categories: • European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh• Women Authors
About the Author
Laura Scott was born in London and now lives in Norwich. Her pamphlet, What I Saw, won the Michael Marks Prize in 2014, and in 2015 she won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her work was featured in New Poetries VII in 2018. So Many Rooms, her first collection, was The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month when it came out in August 2019 and in 2020 it won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize and the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.
Praise for this book
'Anton Chekhov's interrogative power of storytelling flows through Scott's dazzling second collection, which questions our obsession with conclusiveness... Her meticulously constructed poems exhibit a unique comic timing that gives them an elusive spontaneity.' Kit Fan, The Guardian
'Scott, however, is a listener. One achievement of her poetry collection The Fourth Sister - one of many - is the way she summons a tidal wave of talk, then surfs above it. Her style is effortlessly readable and lucid, her effects understated and slow-building, via garden-path sentences that end in extraordinary images. It's a book that rewards re-reading.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'Like the birds which appear in motif throughout this collection, Laura Scott's poems can turn on a wing, startling us with their displays of unexpected beauty. Her graceful - and frequently grace-filled - poems call our attention to life's off-stage moments, illuminating shadowed corners of what might so easily be lost from view.' Kathryn Simmonds
'Written with devastating precision, The Fourth Sister is filled with poems that move and grip in equal measure. It proves that Scott is one of the most exciting voices writing today in England.' Leo Boix
'I so love Laura Scott's poems: elegant, taut, and both thrillingly curious and full of curiosity, they conjure their magic from that perfect space "between telling and withholding". In this beautiful, mysterious collection, she leads us into the dark woods of longing and grief, holding us rapt in the spell of the moment, until - like the fourth sister - she deftly "slips the story's collar".' Liz Berry
'The three-point structural arc given to many of the poems consists of a surprising set up, then a narrative development using unusual images and varying sentence length, and a precisely prepared ending. I think it might be this structure which makes the poems so deliciously satisfying to read.' Tamsin Hopkins, The Alchemy Spoon