Allen & Unwin Soho book Poetry English Paperback 88 pages

Debut collection presenting an uncompromising portrait of love and shame within London's Soho community.

In this intimate and vital debut, Richard Scott creates an uncompromising portrait of love and shame, drawing upon his experience of London's gay communities. Examining how trauma becomes a part of the language we use, Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine.The collection crescendos to Scott's tour de force, 'Oh My Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps of Soho Square becomes a search for true lineage, a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves.

Richard Scott grew up in London and studied at the Royal College of Music and at Goldsmiths College. He has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry mentee, a member of the Aldeburgh 8 and an Open Spaces artist resident at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem 'crocodile' won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho is his first book.