 Williams, describes it as 'a low-key poetic voce, not formally experimental or in any way dramatic, but showing a level attentiveness, a willingness to walk quietly around objects and feelings several times, letting them display different and unexpected facets.){kind=link}
Scott deftly balanced his twin vocations, each informing the other, as in the poetry of the early 17th-century Anglican, George Herbert
The Reverend Dr David Scott, who has died aged 75, was an Anglican priest whose literary talents, particularly as a poet but also as a playwright and an author of spiritual works, were widely recognised and highly regarded. He was a winner in the 1978 BBC Poetry Competition and was awarded the Faber Memorial Prize in 1986.
Priesthood and poetry are callings which have not always sat easily together, one coming to outweigh the other – as, for example, with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Scott, however, managed a quite brilliant balance between the two, each informing the other, as in the poetry of the early 17th-century country parson, George Herbert.
Scott’s first books of poetry, A Quiet Gathering, Playing for England and How Does It Feel?, were inspired and written while he was exercising a faithful, caring and effective ministry as a parish priest in rural north Cumbria, which has been described as “a zone of stripped fells and bare beauty, where the chief companion is the weather”. He was something of a leading light among the “New Lake Poets”, including Geoffrey Holloway, Christopher Pilling and William Scammell.
The engagingly subdued tone of Scott’s poetry reflects his own quiet and unassuming personality. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan (Lord) Williams, describes it as “a low-key poetic voce, not formally experimental or in any way dramatic, but showing a level attentiveness, a willingness to walk quietly around objects and feelings several times, letting them display different and unexpected facets.