Tactile Values

"Mark Scott possess perfect pitch: a conversational music, a feel for dense textures of sound and unpredictable shifts of syntax, a fresh way of combining informal and formal tones that is utterly engaging. I am struck often in his poems by a comparably forceful and complex sensuousness chastened by analytic rigor, an intense and often distressed introspection, a feeling for the juice, the meat, the life in living things. He is a delicious love poet, a provocative linguistic banterer, a moving and painful elegist." -Alicia Ostriker

"By turns subtly figurative then frank and physical as an open hand, Mark Scott's poetry is true to its theme: our manifold, many-folded senses of touch, literal and metaphoric. The voice is that of an original mind quite (yet quietly) unlike any other: playful, modest, profound. With an elusive directness making its findings highly readable, this mind/body balance of Tactile Values seems unique in American poetry." -Reg Saner

"There can be heard in the poetry of Mark Scott the voice of a young poet of exceptional distinction and promise. It is a voice of dedicated intimacy, of an always perceiving closeness to other presences and to the things of this world." -Richard Poirier