Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Richard Scott
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What is Poetry Unbound in Conversation and who is Richard Scott?
Hi friends, Padraig O'Tooma here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound. In between Poetry Unbound seasons, and we have season 11 that'll start later in 2026, we have a whole host of interviews that I've done with poets over the last two years. Poetry Unbound in conversation, we call them. I've loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These Poetry Unbound in Conversation episodes deepened my curiosity about language and art. I trust they will for you too. In this episode, you'll be hearing from Richard Scott, an opera singer turned poet, editor and educator. We met to discuss his second collection of poems, That Broke Into Shining Crystals, which was released last year.
The collection explores how looking at art, whether that's a still life or a shaped crystal, can be a tool toward healing, power and consolation. Just so you know, while there are no explicit details in this interview, the subject matter of the conversation does reference traumatic experiences in childhood. This conversation was recorded on the occasion of the 2025 Collective Trauma Summit. A special thanks to Thomas Hubel, Cassie Johnson and the rest of the team behind the Collective Trauma Summit for making this conversation possible.
Thank you.
A special thanks as well to Richard Scott and his publishers, Faber and Faber. Welcome to Poetry Unbound in Conversation. I'm Padraig O'Tooma, and here I am with the poet Richard Scott.
Hello, my name is Padraig O'Tooma and I'm delighted to be in conversation with Richard Scott. Richard Scott was born in London in 1981 and his debut collection, Soho, which came out in 2018, was a Gaze the Word Book of the Year and it was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award as well. And his second poetry collection, That Broken to Shining Crystals, was published this year by Faber and Faber also. He's a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths at the University of London, and he runs a poetry writing group there, and he also teaches poetry at the Faber Academy. So Richard, you are so very, very welcome to this conversation.
So lovely to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Pleasure. I'd like to jump right into talking about this latest book of yours, Richard, that broke into shining crystals. And 21 poems, the first 21 poems, all are studies of still lifes. Still life with rose, still life with a basket of songbirds, still life with cornflower, still life with grape, etc. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that sequence and your focus on still life.
Yeah, of course. Well, I guess I've always been really interested in still life paintings. I've always been really fascinated in the beauty of that world and the kind of symbols that the artists are working with. And I think writing this sequence of poems kind of brought me closer to understanding why I was so fascinated in still life paintings. And I think it has a lot to do with how the still life painting, this kind of startling, varnished preservation, evokes for me in a way how the brain freezes trauma. So trauma or hurt can be frozen in the brain and then recalled, albeit unwittingly, in kind of absolute clarity. But I think, you know, I'm also really interested in language and the book for me is an exploration into language.
And the speaker in the poems, they can't say directly what's happened to them because speaking... directly is too painful and so they turn to different types of language and the first type of language they turn to is ekphrasis or the language of the still life painting and they focus on these symbols like a rose an oyster or a grape and in response to that uh kind of tight lyric focus something is revealed to them again and again i wonder if you could read one of those for us um still life with apple it's got a longer title but the one on page 22
I'd be delighted to read it.
I should just say that this poem utilizes a quote from Lacan, and the quote is, a symptom is a word trapped inside the body.
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3 chaptersSpeakers
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