Borrowed Landscapes

Description

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.;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 autobiogra.