The Observer - 04.08.2019

52

The Observer

04.08.19 Books

Leo Tolstoy

on his 80th

birthday.

Heritage Images/

Getty

I knew nothing about Laura

Scott when I picked this book

up by chance. There is a thrill in

encountering a debut collection

that insists – in this case, with

exceptional grace – on being read. I

couldn’t put it down and have kept

returning to these poems, drawn in

by their beauty and clarity. It is the

clarity that interests because it offers

a false sense of security and lightly,

deliberately, misleads. These poems

are not as see-through as they

might, at fi rst, appear. The title is So

Many Rooms, but this is a mysterious

collection of secret passages and

moving uncertainties.

The opening poem , If I Could

Write Like Tolstoy , introduces

a voice intent on investigating

spaces we do not ordinarily occupy.

A lazy glance might encourage

the notion that Scott was merely

leaning on Tolstoy, depending

upon his genius. But repeated

reading shows something other:

her conditional tense creates a

new space that does and does not

exist – like imagination itself.

Tolstoy through

the looking glass

There is melancholy in Scott’s

strange follow-my-leader homages

to Tolstoy, like an exquisite form of

cheating that rings true. Her lyricism

is like shot silk – it ripples with light.

In this fi rst piece she shows poetry

as a form of literary closework,

reimagining as critical appreciation.

But the second poem , How

to Light a Cigarette , enters new

territory – in which the fugitive

“hero in a Russian novel” enjoys a

moment of dangerous freedom in a

modern space. Again, for the reader,

the power is the sense the man does

and does not exist; he is vivid, yet

his existence is not guaranteed. I

love the stillness of the imagery, as

quiet as a Hammershøi interior:

and the mirror loving him from

behind.

Look how he bends his neck, now he

cups

his hands as he lights his cigarette

before h e answers.

This is, one assumes, Pierre from

War and Peace who, in the next

poem, “walks in and out of chapters

smelling of eau de cologne” leading

a debonair afterlife, uncoupled from

his original housing. A short poem,

Tolstoy’s Dog , possibly tells us more

about Scott than Tolstoy, exploring

the sense that the meaning of things

is not to be found in the obvious.

Scott, it seems, cannot let Tolstoy’s

sleeping dog lie as she speculates

about her signifi cance, asking:

What is it that makes her lie

across my mind as if she might be

what all those words were about?

In another still more startling

poem involving dogs, The Dogs

in Greece Are Different , written

during her residency at Harvard

University summer school in Greece,

stray dogs wander through the

airport “sleeping on the unmoving

baggage carousels ”. This terrifi c

poem describes a country in crisis

and re tells Odysseus’s story, giving

a feral ending to an unnamed man,

dressed as a beggar, who returns

home and fi nd wolves, not his dog,

to welcome him.

Scott won the Geoffrey Dearmer

prize in 2015 for her superb,

disconcerting poem The Half-

loved. She has talked about it in

an interview, implying it is about

two people: the lover and the loved.

But reading it, one wonders how

semi-detached it is. It could almost

be about an invasive inner self.

There is permeability to lines such

as these:

And then you feel her sighs

tightening round your ribs ...

This and many other of the poems

involve yearning – A Different Tun e

and What I Know and Fragment

• but who is yearning for what
  is, like so much else in this stellar
  collection, an open question.

To order So Many Rooms go to

guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

own sword, wrap these guts around

your neck, string you up off a tree

and lynch you, and then I would

fi ll your dead mouth with many

blooming fl owers so something that

was beautiful would issue once from

your throat,” a local tells de Flunkl’s

band. “Madame, good morning,”

comes the reply. “I believe we have

made a false beginning. May we

inquire of you whereat the mayor

dwells?”

But the mayor is long dead,

murdered by restless townspeople

whose travails Fagan intercuts

with de Flunkl’s predatory errand.

Dervorgilla, struggling to feed her

baby, imagines how her nails could

“slide so easily through the spongy

skin” of his fontanelle, “stirring out

the brains”. Glynis and Aethelburga

argue over the tree sprouting in

the middle of their one-room

dwelling: “She probably expects him

to take care of it; I know by where

she leaves her silences, he thinks,

sipping his jug of ale, looking out of

the window.”

A plague

on all

their

houses

Nobber

Oisín Fagan

JM Originals, £12.99, pp304

Fiction

Poetry book of the month

So Many Rooms

Laura Scott

Carcanet , £9.99 , pp72

In her debut collection,

Laura Scott channels the

Russian novelist with

extraordinary results,

writes Kate Kellaway

If I Could Write Like Tolstoy

you’d see a man

dying in a fi eld with a fl agstaff still in his hands.

I’d take you close until you saw the grass

blowing around his head, and his eyes

looking up at the white sky. I’d show you

a pale-faced Tsar on a horse under a tree,

breath from its nostrils, creases in gloved fi ngers

pulling at the reins, perhaps hoof marks in the mud

as he jumps the ditch at the end of the fi eld.

I’d show you men walking down a road,

one of them shouting to the others to get off it.

You’d hear the ice crack as they slipped down the bank

to join him, bringing their horses with them. You’d feel

the blood coming out of the back of someone’s head,

warm for a moment, before it touched the snow.

I’d show you a dead man come back to life.

Then I’d make you wait – for pages and pages –

before you saw him, go to his window

and look at how the moon turns half a row

of trees silver, leaves the other half black.

These people could be anybody,

anywhere, save for the town’s

growing ranks of fl yblown corpses,

the unexplained emergence in the

neighbourhood of a giant, crow-

coated crucifi x, and Colca, a clothes-

shy blacksmith whose outlandish

proclivities are indulged by local

toughs until he helps another greedy

incomer, referred to as “the man”,

enforce a curfew. “He fucks horses,”

someone says during a revolt. “He

fucks them and is always naked.

Angela Fitzsimmons said she saw

him offi ciating a mass over two

goats in the woods. He had put little

hats on them, and then married

them, one to the other.”

While Fagan hardly ignores the

comedy and shock value inherent

in this material, he takes his cast

seriously, too. Colca’s bestiality

informs the book’s most uproarious

moments as well as its saddest. A

subplot involves a woman avenging

her enslavement at his hands by

disembowelling his beloved mare,

Emota, whose intestines end up a

plaything for a mushroom-addled

child attached to de Flunkl’s band,

but there’s also a powerful exchange

between Colca and his long-

suffering mother, Raghnailt, urging

him to change as he reveals the

suicidal despair his cravings have

caused him.

You could see Nobber as an

anarchic snapshot of a society in

fl ux, a warning about the seductions

of demagoguery, or even a send-up

of disaster capitalism; in an Irish

context, the scene of Colca’s

mother’s anguish at her son’s

eventual fate can’t help echoing the

kangaroo-court justice dealt out by

paramilitaries. Yet the novel never

feels like a vessel for anything so

simple as a message; a grisly, gross-

out slice of medieval life and death,

it’s vigorously, writhingly itself,

spilling out of any box you put it in.

Anthony Cummins

To order Nobber for £11.43 go to

guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

Oisín Fagan: ‘a

writer out to do

whatever the hell

he wants’.

Irish writer Oisín Fagan ’s debut story

collection , Hostages , narrated in part

by a talking bomb, announced a

writer out to do whatever the hell he

wants – an approach confi rmed by

his wild fi rst novel , set in the middle

ages and named after the plague-hit

Irish town where it unfolds.

It starts by following a young

aristocrat, Osprey de Flunkl ,

touring Ireland to profi t from

what’s known as “the sickness” by

hoovering up property deeds of the

largely illiterate dead. He’s joined

by a bickering retinue including a

hard-pressed translator, William

of Roscrea , relied on for diplomacy

with marauding Gaels equally keen

to use the plague to recapture land

the Normans forced them from.

Clashing registers drive

a violent narrative.

“I would do well to

unhand you of your

o

ell

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touring Ireland to
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largely illiterate d
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Clash
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