The mill grinds the summer air

to invisible bread, and the bridge circles the summer
in half-moons of rich, cool water and molten blue;
echo on echo the years elide and shimmer,
pass themselves carelessly on, and under, and through


     from 'Reaches: 1946'

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'.

Contents


The Old Type Tray
Figures in a Landscape, 1944
The Way
Estuary
Out of Season
The Singing Field
Out There
Three Evening Pastorals
    Scarecrows
    It
    Set-aside
A Civil War
    Wildstrubel, 1913
    Christmas: Hanover, France, Cambridge, 1914
    Adams Road, 1915
    42nd Motorised Ambulance Company, 1916-1918
    Obiter Scripta: France, August-November 1918
    Anthropologies: London and Africa, 1920-1953
    Torre House, Harpenden, 1963
    Wetten, November 2006
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
    Prologue: Negative Space
    Michaelmas Term, 1954
    Playtime in a Cold City
    Father
    The English Faculty, or Sweetness and Light
    Long Vacation, August 1955
    ‘God with us’
    Mind Games
    In the Dark
    Considerations
    Notes from Oxford
    Basic Training for Fine Minds
    ‘They’re Off!’
    Amours de Voyage
    Long Vacation, August 1956
    Get Well Soon
    A Somewhere Hut
    The Lady’s Not For Burning
    Lost Hearts
    Unfoldings
    Epilogue: Whatever Happened?
Eskimo Toys