Particularly arresting in After-image, poems drawn from the wealth of manuscripts left by Scott after his untimely death in 1991, and edited by his friend and fellow poet, Mervyn Morris, are those that focus on his own coming death, his hope/confidence that ‘when this machine is dead/ the poems it made will flare/ wild...’ These are poems vibrant with life, with curiosity about this new journey, ‘a certain satisfaction from/ questions articulated’, poems of an inspiring courage. Though the world becomes confined to a ward, a body, a tirelessly curious mind, there is no sense of diminution when a vase of flowers on a hospital table brings him ‘The surprise of wild flowers!/ Walls fall open, roofs melt/ I too grow upwards.’ There are the pleasures of travelling light, ‘A small bird, bearing/ news from the front’, and the pangs and consolations of not knowing what is to come. He sees the bird that ‘shits on my neat/ green/ garden// I do not know/ what will grow’, but he also draws peace from the sense of continuation when he watches the ocean and thinks ‘Let the sea repeat/ unwatched, its long, salt hymn.’ And there is his poet’s wit writing about death the editor in the last poem in the collection, the last two lines left artfully incomplete, of waiting on ‘that blue hand that/ could be here, now,’.
Scott’s work is acknowledged as one of the major influences on the direction of Caribbean theatre. He died at the early age of fifty-one in 1991.