Search results for ""Author Peter Scupham""

Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the "Battle of Arras", "Kilvert's Diary", and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful fictions explore meeting points and intersections between 'is' and 'was', or 'is' and 'might be'. The centre of the book is a substantial sequence, "The Northern Line", where the poet's double, in his old guise as a National Serviceman, takes a journey by ghost train through the 1950s, that hinge of the century when the trouble of great wars gave way to the troubles of a patchwork peace.

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Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age shaped by the Suez crisis and the Cold War. The barbarities of the twentieth century haunt the shadows; there is comfort in the graces of domestic life, in friendships and long memories, in cats and gardens and eccentricities. A sequence of poems honours the life of a scholarly father-in-law who fought in the Great War. In a parallel autobiographical sequence, 'Playtime in a Cold City', three undergraduate years in the 1950s become a touchstone for a lost pastoral, before the 'fields of youth' fade to memory, 'the lit faces of dead friends, /laughing'. Generous, witty and shrewd, Borrowed Landscapes affirms Scupham's belief that when a 'murderous crew' of sorcerer's apprentices 'turn is to was', there is 'only a pen to turn was to is'.

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The poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scupham's hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling 'Curtain Call', often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and historical, which haunt the present. All business is unfinished business: one can be caught out by a sudden phrase, or the look back of a landscape once seen sporting a different disguise. Invitation to View is framed by poems considering possible visitors to the poet's 400-year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind; it is haunted by the variety of the efforts and gestures they have made in bringing house and garden alive. Time will do its best to modify and forget all that they leave. Many gestures were theatrical: poetry picnics, productions of Shakespeare... the dead welcomed with the living. Tom Stoppard's words from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can provide an absent epigraph: 'Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.'

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