Carcanet online book launch: The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott

Laura Scott launches her second collection, The Fourth Sister, reading from the book of unusual love poems and chatting about it to associate publisher at Manchester’s Carcanet Press, John McAuliffe.

London-born Laura Scott won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize in 2020 with So Many Rooms, which was The Guardian‘s Poetry Book of the Month.

London-born Laura Scott won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize in 2020 with So Many Rooms, which was The Guardian‘s Poetry Book of the Month when it came out in August 2019. It also won Norwich-based Laura the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Her pamphlet, What I Saw, won the Michael Marks Prize in 2014, and in 2015 she won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her work was published by Carcanet in New Poetries VII in 2018 and this new collection features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. Says the publisher: ‘The book’s energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth’s sense: “an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.”‘

Poet Liz Berry – whose own latest book, The Home Child, hits shelves on 2 March – says: ‘I so love Laura Scott’s poems: elegant, taut, and both thrillingly curious and full of curiosity, they conjure their magic from that perfect space “between telling and withholding”. In this beautiful, mysterious collection, she leads us into the dark woods of longing and grief, holding us rapt in the spell of the moment, until – like the fourth sister – she deftly “slips the story’s collar”.’

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.