Book description
Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed
Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and
nightmare, a landscapre 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'.
'Scupham... is one of the few contemporary poets whose versions of
lyric and pastoral can retain their richness and still sound modern.' -
John Greening, TLS, 23 December 2011 '...still one of the most
dependable, enjoyable and scrupulous verse craftsmen alive today.
Borrowed Landscapes seems to comprehend a lifetime of thinking, feeling
and reading.' - Michael Glover, the Tablet, 5 May 2012 Peter
Scupham was born in Liverpool in 1933 and studied at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge. He founded the Mandeville Press with John Mole. He was
given a Cholmondeley Award in 1996 and is a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. Peter Scupham has published a number of poetry
collections with Oxford University Press and Anvil. Carcanet publish
his Collected Poems (2003), and his edition of selections from Arthur
Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (2005). He lives in
Norfolk where he runs an antiquarian book business with Margaret Steward.
