Borrowed Landscapes

Peter Scupham

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847770806
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779458
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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'.

Playtime in a Cold City

Emmanuel College, Cambridge. 1954–1957

… the last years of an exclusive masculine pastoral; snug studies, gas fires, lamplight, ghost-stories, fog at the windows. Cold staircases with bare light bulbs, fine rooms, sometimes stupendously fine rooms opening off them…

Peter Davidson, ‘Secret Cambridge’, from English Anxieties by Tim Brennan (Photoworks, 2009)

Remembering John Hadwen and Tony Glover and for Desmond Gailey and Carola Scupham

Prologue: Negative Space

No matter yesterday how clouds were backed.

Animal contours float over us for ever

whose stretched skins, belly-upward looks

breed definitions of lost space, lost time

contingent on those puzzling malformations:

tracts of sky-jungle for our philosophising.

It is the in-betweenness of it all,

the precise shape of each all-important absence

that takes the eye, that takes the eye away

into blue’s fugitive laughter, the sighs of grey:

the fields of youth which hold those amities

forgotten words were found to certify,

words lost between the saying of leaves

chattering and whispering over running water,

hovering between new market conversations,

climbing a college stair, fidgeting up airily

against the downward drag, the clatter

and rush of new words tumbling down,

out into spaces between stone and stone

as white and filmy as a medium’s gauze,

as a sky-creature at its brief touch-down.

Michaelmas Term, 1954

A box or two of books, an old cabin trunk

strapped on the rusty grid

of a 1930s Daimler fixed-head coupé –

a period piece run out of period.

A college landlady, granny-bosomed

with the milk of human kindness

cosying over a cosiness of ghosts,

brown furniture, an evensong

of elderly clergymen in college scarves.

Skins of light and cold.

After Grace, the brief nesting-pother

of male bottoms benching themselves

for feeding time: that low roar and growl

stared through by red and black divines

framed in twists of barley sugar.

Obligatory: the duffle coat from Millet’s,

the provisional friends, the new pipe,

the first essay: The Fool’s role in Lear.

A Gothic shell, alive with hermit crabs.

Held to the ear, such snarl and purr-miaow:

robes and furred gowns. The chew of cud,

the little bat-squeaks of dismantled poems

pleading softly to be re-assembled.

Surely we’d done this with our Bren guns?

Playtime in a Cold City

For children of fireweed, sirens, barrack squares,

pre-emptive strikes and midnight conversation,

it is playtime in a cold city. Three locust years.

We watch with incurious fascination

as clout upon trembling clout, this giant ball

brings Rance’s Folly sliding to the ground;

banquet and roof-top tennis, fix-and-deal,

waft up and away to never-never land –

Victorian ghostlife, pushing fists of cloud

past lookalikes of chimneys, windows, doors.

The breeze swings on its hinge; a gaseous shroud

street-corners it about some sad-case stairs

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• The Old Type Tray
• Figures in a Landscape, 1944
• The Way
• Estuary
• Out of Season
• The Singing Field
• Out There
• Three Evening Pastorals
• A Civil War
• The Hunt
• Shredded with Rose
• Generations
• Spots
• Goodman
• Cat and Mouse
• A Merry-go-round for Megan
• May
• Borrowed Landscapes
• Seventy Years a Showman
• At the Window
• Flight into Egypt
• Unusual Phenomena
• September Song
• Between the Lines
• Lawnheads Avenue
• Hurrel’s Walk
• Green Boy
• Reaches: 1946
• Night Moles: Cambridge
• Umbrella Man
• ‘Market Rasen Nostalgia’
• Playtime in a Cold City
• Eskimo Toys
• About the Author
• Also by Peter Scupham from Carcanet Press
• Copyright