POEM OF THE WEEK

In Tom Stoppard’s farce The Real Inspector Hound, a jaded theatre critic watching a murder mystery gets up from his seat in the stalls, walks onto the stage, and finds he has slipped into its fictional world, becoming one of the characters. Things don’t work out well for him – it’s a murder mystery, after all – but still, it’s an idea I’ve always found beguiling. Just imagine dropping in for afternoon tea with Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. Watching certain plays, you wish you could become part of them.

In this poem from London-born writer Laura Scott’s The Fourth Sister (a 2023 Telegraph book of the year), she does precisely that – imagining her way into Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as a member of the family. It’s one of a handful of Chekhov-inspired poems in the book, which riff on the rhythms of the playwright’s dialogue, and his characters’ endless chatter; Scott listens for “the dips and wells of silence” and “another sound, coiled inside the pauses, like rain falling”.

“To Be One of Them” is a poem that talks, and talks, and talks. Notice how each of its three long sentences is longer than the last; you’re never quite sure when – or where – they might end. They’re langorous and wayward, alive and unpredictable.

“For me, writing a poem… requires a sort of blur, an incomplete awareness,” Scott has said. “I need to only half know what I’m doing. A crisp overview and a feeling of being in control is fatal.” She sees poetry as a way of “replaying time, slowing it down and making it happen again”.

Talk, in Scott’s poetry, plays a similar role: it can turn back the clock, reshape the world around it. Her images often cast conversation as something tangible; the sisters’ “talked thoughts” take on a physical “weight”; they throw out lines like “scattering seeds”.

In another Scott poem, “When Death Got Bored in the Hospital”, conversation poignantly becomes a barrier against the blistering fact of a fatal diagnosis: “we talked until our voices turned into splints // in a parasol [...] shading us from the heat / of what was happening to you”. Why do we talk to one another? “To slow life’s ruin down”.

Tristram Fane Saunders