“Like Miniature Dioramas” — A Review of Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms
It’s difficult not to sit up straighter and sharpen one’s focus when a collection begins with a poem titled “If I Could Write Like Tolstoy,” the decision to draw upon the tradition of Russian literature a form of statement making without formally making a statement. Such is the case with Laura Scott’s debut collection So Many Rooms, in which the reader finds themselves immersed in Tolstoy and War and Peace — the topics of the first four poems — before just as quickly being whisked off and dropped into other similarly clustered grouping of poems, much like how a bee dances from flower to flower and indulging in the sweet taste of each one.
So Many Rooms showcases not only the breadth of Scott’s knowledge but also her ability to create a sense of space and intimacy, which persist over the span of sixty pages worth of poems, and it is this very sensation of bouncing — or rather floating — from poem to poem through the collection that makes the collection so captivating. The collection’s structure loosely recalls the poetic forms of the villanelle and the pantoum, in which lines from the first tercet or stanza repeat throughout the poem, as elements and themes are frequently carried between consecutive poems. As a result, the opening cluster focusing on Russian literature becomes a tranquil marvelling of trees becomes an exploration of family dynamics.
True to its title, So Many Rooms is a collection that fittingly reads like walking through the rooms and grounds of a large historical house — or, for those who prefer continuity in their analogies, reminded me strongly of the cinematography and spatial arrangement in the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina — where the reader is looking around themselves as well as at the speaker, who in turn is looking to yet another individual, an “I” they
env[y] with all the four chambers of [their] heart —
to be bored like that, bored like an aristocrat
lying on a sofa somewhere in a room where the windows
stretch all the way down to the floor and the walls are blue
as the eyes of peacock feathers.
There are numerous literal rooms in Scott’s poems. Crafted like miniature dioramas, they cause the reader to stop, stand, and carefully marvel at their surroundings the way we would with the real-life equivalent. While dioramas are often haunting spaces that leave clues without speaking for themselves, Scott gives these rooms, as well as other familiar domestic spaces, a breath of life, whether imagining their past — “A king planted [the mulberry tree] years ago so his mistress could wear silk. / I imagine her dress, / the colour left on the side of your bowl.” — or providing sharp commentary about their present, as in the eponymous poem “So Many Houses”: “So many rooms and so many houses/ [the grown-ups] had to spread the paintings / thinly over the walls.”
Yet as one progresses through So Many Rooms, the definition of the “room” gradually expands into the larger world, whether with the heavy and critical poems “The Dogs in Greece Are Different” and “The Photograph of Two Girls,” which serve as reminders of all the struggle that exists on a daily basis beyond the fence of our egocentric comforts, or with poem like “Somewhere” and “Cove,” in which the speaker reaches for a world that is equal parts literature and nostalgic longing for a
place
where the myths are still
soft as they leave your lips,
where I can see the heroes
start to move with their names
like jewels, hanging
around their necks.
What starts out as physical space becomes, over the course of the collection, an examination of the influences that shape us collectively and as individuals, crystallizing in what we come to think of as home in the material sense as well as in the habits and beliefs we carry with us through life, adding to or tweaking them like a collector of art or ceramics would. It is therefore fitting that the two bookends of So Many Rooms are both rooted in literature; while the opening poem introduced us to Scott’s microscopic attentiveness to the world, the closing poem “What You Left Out” serves as a synthesis of literary sources and the most intimate form of desire, the kind that exists when we have lost our fear of the wideness of the world and stand on the doorstep, admiring its complexity.
