So Many Rooms

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 poems have appeared in various magazines including PN Review, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Review, and a selection of her work was featured in Carcanet's New Poetries VII in 2018.

`So Many Rooms is beguiling and lyrically persuasive. Scott's fine formal control and her mesmerising shifts of imagery underpin poems of sensual intelligence, thoughtfulness and poetic beauty.' - Sasha Dugdale; `Not just a gathering of poems, but an intricate through-composed work in which images and stories are turned and refigured from page to page. These are short lyrics on big canvases - mythic, ambitious and richly engaging.' - Michael Symmons Roberts; `These are intimate poems, grounded, yet dreamlike, revealing the beauty, gravity and power at the core of the everyday. They're all the more compelling because it's as if the poems are allowed to make their own discoveries with the poet knowing exactly when to step back, and when and how to intervene.' - Moniza Alvi; `Concealing as much as they reveal, Laura Scott's eloquent fables combine acute attention to minutiae (`the creases in gloved fingers') with a beguiling sense of the world's unpredictability. These unerringly deft poems reveal what Marianne Moore once called the `mystery of construction', bathing the everyday in a light both compassionate and uncanny. So Many Rooms is a startling debut collection from a formidably gifted poet.' - Mark Ford