Borrowed Landscapes E-Book

Peter Scupham

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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'.

Leseprobe

PETER SCUPHAM

Borrowed Landscapes

Acknowledgements

Some of these poems have appeared in The Rialto, PN Review, OxfordPoets 2001, A Treasury of Love Poems (Book Blocks), Christmas Books (Mandeville Press), and the Emmanuel College Magazine. ‘Out of Season’ was published in a limited edition by the Chestnut Press. ‘Seventy Years a Showman’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, 2006, and appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry, 2006.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

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

About the Author

Also by Peter Scupham from Carcanet Press

Copyright

The Old Type Tray

for Roger Burford Mason, 1943-1998

Here triune orchid, Caesar, swan,

find Auden’s common box, lie down

in beds of loose and lettered gravel;

patience now must undishevel

feathers, tongues and petals long dispelled –

the case is everything which is the world.

Collected Works, Principia,

primal scream and earliest ur,

tall talk, the latest from the street

where Caliban, Miranda meet

spill from this crazy leaden casket, still

packed to the brim with hope and syllable.

For words – which grew from thinginess –

have cast their spells in metal dress,

each petalled, feather-light impression

a stay against their distribution:

typographer and text, the clock defied,

put to their final proof and justified.

Figures in a Landscape, 1944

for John and Mary Mole

We could hear the oncoming doodle-bug behind us chugging like a motor bike, in front of us on a rise to the left we saw two semi-detached houses. A man was digging in a garden alongside, a little boy was running up the garden path towards the house… at the doorway was a woman beckoning him to hurry indoors… there was a loud explosion, a mushroom cloud of dust. Everything went up; no houses, no man, no mother and no boy. We picked up three dustbins full of pieces out of the rubble. The only way to identify where they were was the dampening dust and the cloud of flies.

Stanley Rothwell, Lambeth at War (SE1 People’s History Project, 1981), quoted by Jane Stevenson in Edward Burra:

A Twentieth Century Eye (Jonathan Cape, 2007)

I

How busy, busy, busy these ghosts are,

who pack away their bones and wrinkles,

roll ashen sleeves up for the duration.

She ties time back to its apron strings,

puts up her hair in a nest of curlers.

They cling tight for a safe rough-ride

when she pummels and scrubs life stupid,

sets the Vactric moaning like a siren,

pegs out her tempers to the washing-line.

He buffs up his blue, chalk-striped trousers,

snaps the jaws of his briefcase shut

on dull certificates of proficiency,

sets out in khaki on a croaking push-bike

for sticky-bombs, firecrackers, clay grenades,

the Captain’s chalk-and-talk in the Village Hall.

Their children’s job is just to shrink a little,

cut rinds of mud from square-toed shoes,

trundle dolly about in a deadbeat pram

while the wireless wraps house and garden

in creamy sheets of taratantara.

Housewives without choice, workers without playtime

work themselves back again to skim and bone.

The dustmen make schräge musik with the bins,

swinging us all to the grave on stooped shoulders.

II

Big flowers lean to the sun,

blonde village simpletons,

dirt faces picked to moons

like the one I watch climb,

pause out on a limb

of a tree I can’t name

in a place I called home.

Each dissolving room

rubs to the same

patch of distempered wall

made gestural

by Van Gogh’s chorale:

sunflowers with yellow heads

A Zouave’s brilliant red,

a blue cart in a field

their licks of paint all

primary, primal.

The world before this fall

into unlit green and brown

where the big flowers lean

and bombers groan.

III

In a flat-faced semi on the road out

shaky taps have left their misery running.

Garden-skins souse in slurps of cess

or loll and sunburn to a sour frizz.

Is it Charlie Holmes, digging in his patch,

in battledress, in summer, in silence?

At the window I watch our neighbour’s child

go riding down the gravel in his coffin,

watch Charlie, Father: patched and taciturn

as guys or scarecrows, whose hands

cradle potatoes like misshapen eggs

wring chickens’ necks, drown kittens.

Houses brim with slow, hoarded anger;

spill to outbursts of wild sobbing.

Mens’ work is burial, exhumation;

the clay weeps at their slicing spades.

IV

War, cat-like, hoards nine lives

in dust-scribbles, boxes of dull silence.

Here the boy cupboards his ruinous loves –