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Springing from ordinary events, or a picture, or an aspect of the priestly life, David Scott’s beautifully restrained poems work up the detail into a moment of significance.
They are rooted in an English culture which is found not only in locality, but also in understatement, and the sideways look. But his poetry has wider reverberations, exploring spirituality and ways of praying as well as momentary glimpses of meaning caught in everyday life.
‘With this volume, Beyond the Drift, David Scott has some claim to be the Church of England’s finest living poet.’ - Ronald Blyth, Church Times
'I have lived with this volume for the past month. It has become a treasure. I commend it highly...Here is a major talent, writing of the territory of faith and human experience with enquiry and mystery, with intelligence and honesty, with simplicity and profundity – above all, with the ability to put the right word in the right place' - The Rev Geoff Corne, Methodist Recorder [on Beyond the Drift].
'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, The Manchester Review [on Beyond the Drift].
David Scott (1947–2022) was renowned as a poet, priest and religious writer who first came to public attention in 1978 when he won the Sunday Times/BBC national poetry competition with his poem ‘Kirkwall Auction Mart’ and appeared on television news programmes reading the poem in situ. A Quiet Gathering, his first book of poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1984, and won him the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1986. His second collection, Playing for England (Bloodaxe Books, 1989) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Both books were illustrated by Graham Arnold of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The poems from the two collections were republished with new work in David Scott’s Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), and followed by Piecing Together in 2005. His retrospective, Beyond the Drift: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), drew on his four previous Bloodaxe titles, with the addition of a whole collection of new poems.