Wow! eBook
Borrowed Landscapes First Edition
Author(s): Peter Scupham (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 25 Aug. 2011
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 96 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847770800
- ISBN-13: 9781847770806
Book Description
‘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’.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Surely the best of Peter Scupham’s poems will endure, taking their place with Hardy’s, Frost’s and Edward Thomas’s among the classics of the last hundred years. –Anne Stevenson
About the Author
Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool in 1933 and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He co-founded The Mandeville Press and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems (2002), his Selected Poems (1999) and several collections of his poems. He has also published previous books with Oxford University Press and Anvil. He now lives in Norfolk where he runs a catalogue book business.
