Richard Scott (13) (1981–)

It's quite something to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for your first collection of poetry, but it's not difficult to see why this caught the judges' eye - or indeed why Fabers published it. Scott may be young enough not to be afraid of shocking us and doing wild, transgressive things with his choice of subject-matter, but he's also a very intelligent, self-confident writer with a sure feeling for language and an enormous stylistic range. He could well turn out to be the James Kirkup or Gerard Reve of the Grindr generation.

The poems in this collection are all, in one way or another, about the poet's experience as a gay man - personal or sympathetically imagined, it doesn't really matter to the reader, although in "Admission" the speaker of the poem anxiously asks "now that you know do you still like me", and it obviously does matter very much to him. And we go from glorious, painful but exciting encounters in public toilets to Greek art and citations from Freud, Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick. Sex is exhilarating and beautiful and dangerous, queer existence for Scott is never something you merely are, it's about what you do and with whom and about the people and places in the past that it connects you with, it's something that others have fought to make acceptable in the world and that you still have to fight for. And in many ways he seems to regret the passing of the old surreptitiousness that his generation never really experienced.

The real highlight of the collection is the title poem, a long walk through night-time Soho, reflecting on the area's queer history and how that interferes with its present in strange and unexpected ways when you know about it, and the joy and anger and grief that goes with that. This is a nine-page summary of what was missing from Peter Ackroyd's half-baked Queer city - in fact it's a good substitute for that book. The opening lines give a feeling for Scott's amazing range (and his debt to Whitman?):

Urine-lashed maze of cobble and hay-brick! Oh
chunder-fogged, rosy-lit, cliché-worthy quadrant. I
could not call you beauteous but nightly I've strolled your
Shaftesbury slums for a bout of wink and fumble.

Apart from "Soho" itself, another poem that's bound to turn up in anthologies is "museum", a glorious Kirkup-style sexual fantasy about a Greek sculpture, presumably the Marion Kouros in the British Museum, with more than a hint of self-parody about it.

...bending my head
like a boyfriend
towards the reliquary
of your earth-
scarred sternum I
kiss your chiselled
flesh...

There's perhaps a lot in this collection that you'll not be able to make much sense of if you don't have at least a superficial knowledge of London gay male culture, and you should be asking for your money back if you don't find at least some of it extremely shocking, but this is definitely worth a look if you're open to that.… (más)