To read this book is to encounter a writer of conscience, intelligence, and eloquence, a candid and humane activist, an adventurer, traveler, runner, a penetrating scholar, and teacher....Find this book. In the bludgeoning crush of public events, this book refreshes by reminding one that some valuable human beings with authentic voices are still among us.

Books in Canada, Summer 1995, 30: "Murmur of the Stars is a rich, humane, tough book, drawn with a delicate, occasionally dark, wit."

Boston Review, Feb.-Mar. 1995, 31-32:

"Scott now demonstrates a...combination of intellectual passion, self-deprecation, seriousness of purpose, and muted humor...set to a variety of intentions....Reminiscent of late Williams in the measuring of perception and phrase to the line, Scott achieves a more muscular and condensed expression; one which, though natural speech, avoids diffusiveness....These are not poems flashy in their effects, which is fitting to Scott's tone -- steady, meditative, adequately distant to record the movement of mind and the events in the poet's life without excessive self-dramatization. More than the psycho-drama of autobiography, Scott is interested in tracing the connections between personal events and a more worldly and sometimes hidden network....Like Pound, Scott is drawn in other poems to the example of the classical Chinese poets, and perhaps shares even more of their sensibility....Scott's work is rooted in a physical, sensual earthiness; from that location, and from a grounding in himself, he ponders the nature of selflessness."

Scott's poetry...is marked by a simple faith in life and an infinite sympathy for all things aninmate and inanimate. This is a book about the natural world as a spiritual resource....The art in Scott's poetry lies in the balance his short, clipped lines strike between colloquial ease and structural constraint, between instinct and logic. The best poems...display a use of language that is original and disarming, with remarkable evocative powers....He is able to take us past the words and their meaning to where the true vitality of understanding lies....his strategy is, in a way, Chekovian: to weave the fabric of the poem so persuasively that its meaning can be felt only indirectly....It seems that we are looking at possibly more than the poetic instinct and skill of a major poet, but maybe, just maybe, at a wonderful new departure in the Canadian lyric. Scott...might very well help vitally redefine the way we think and feel in Canadian poetry.