Borrowed Landscapes

"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".