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There's something quite old-fashioned about Peter
Scupham's poetry. He pays scrupulous attention to form, is fond of elaborate
repetition and rhyme-schemes, quotes freely from Shakespeare and the
Classics, and many of the poems in this current collection explore his
undergraduate days at Cambridge, including references to figures such as
Leavis, Empson and C.S.Lewis. His subject-matter is also often quite
traditional: pastorals, landscape poems, explorations of time and war,
coupled with a naturally elegiac dying fall. None of this is necessarily a
bad thing, but it means that his craftsmanlike, careful poems, which
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, appeared every few years in slim collections
from Oxford University Press, could just as easily have appeared in the
1950s. He shares favourite subjects with unfashionable poets like Geoffrey
Grigson and Antony Thwaite, plus occasionally the gothic tones of Walter de
la Mare.
When the old 'Oxford Poets' imprint disappeared, established names such as
Scupham, Hugo Williams, Anne Stevenson and Peter Porter had to find other
publishing homes: Anvil Press subsequently brought out 'Night Watch' in 1999,
and this new volume is his first new collection for Carcanet, as well as his
first collection for over ten years. It is a strong volume, though liberally
doused in nostalgia and, in some places, quite backward-looking, as befits a
writer now in his late seventies. There is here, however, none of the fairly
experimental free verse found in many Carcanet volumes.
Of the two major sequences in the collection, the first, 'A Civil War',
concerns the German family of Scupham's wife, who were academics in Cambridge
in the 1880s, and their experiences of WWI and beyond. Unsurprisingly, questions
of German culture and identity are raised and often, as in 'Anthropologies:
London and Africa, 1920 - 1953', the effect is of paging swiftly through a
vast photograph album. The sepia faces pass in a flash, famous names are
encountered (W.W.Skeat, Huxley) and later, postwar life is briskly summarised
in eight stanzas. For this to work, the quick glimpses and vivid details must
be chosen with great care: another poem here, 'Seventy Years a Showman' is
much more successful using this method. 'A Civil War' ends with the famous
meeting between Henry Allingham and Roger Meier, the oldest veterans of the
Great War, in Germany in 2006. As a symbol, emblematic of the two warring
cultures, it is appropriate, but feels a little too pat to round off the
sequence.
The second long sequence here, 'Playtime in a Cold City, concerns the poet's
time in Cambridge in the 1950s, his studies interrupted by being called up as
a reservist while the Suez Crisis boils over in the wings. Here there is
plenty of atmosphere - Scupham's contemporaries are 'children of fireweed,
sirens, barrack squares' ('Playtime in a Cold City'), they go punting when
not listening to lectures by Leavis and co, and then suddenly this gothic
leafiness is interrupted by being called up. Entertainment whilst waiting is
'Goon Show hilarity' or puzzling at
'C.P.Snow's two cultures' ('A Somewhere Hut') - all nice little touches, but
ultimately the final poem finds Scupham wondering 'whatever happened' and
concluding:
...Elvis
shakes away 'Heartbreak Hotel'.
Squirrels and bears eat each other's hearts out;
Soviet tanks grind into Budapest.
('Epilogue:
Whatever Happened?')
This feels authentic, but perhaps also illuminates the sense of confusion and
pointlessness which the military hanging around suggests: Elvis was about to
do away with the 'hot jazz' beloved of the Cambridge undergraduate set, John
Osborne's Jimmy Porter was about to explode onstage (the 'squirrels' and
'bears' refer to the concluding speeches of 'Look Back in Anger') and the
Cold War was about to escalate the scale of conflict.
The simplicities encountered by those like Scupham, called up for service,
but eventually sent back to Civvy Street, were about to be replaced by a set
of much more complex problems, unravelling on into the 1960s. This sequence,
therefore, feels a bit like a time capsule, as do the descriptions of fairly
privileged Cambridge undergraduate paraphernalia. 'Just young men kicking up
each other's heelsÉas punts from Scudamore's idle through the backs', as the
concluding poem puts it, but in an age when the ruling-class, Etonian few
seem to be in the ascendant once again, one wonders if this is enough and,
more seriously, whether it should be celebrated so preciously. Having said
all this, one poem in the sequence, 'The English Faculty, or Sweetness and
Light', makes some witty parallels between electric lighting and the making
of the canonical Leavisite Great Tradition.
If these long sequences are both, somehow, problematic, then it is a relief
to turn to Scupham's keen eye for landscape. 'Figures in a Landscape, 1944'
is a smaller series of seven
poems, returning to the time-frame explored in his 1988 collection, 'The Air
Show', here producing a moving sequence triggered by a single detail, where
'the labouring gear-change of a truck' can suddenly become the deadly 'silver
bombers wrapped in quiet thunder'. 'Three Evening Pastorals' recall earlier
pastoral pieces and create gothic scenes of quiet intensity: 'zig-zags of
migraine / ribbon the wind's tail' ('Scarecrows') whilst 'heavy metal /
ploughs field-names under' ('Set-aside'). Elsewhere, there are three witty
poems on cats (two too many, surely?) which add a sense of Scupham's range,
plus a delightful, mischievous poem for a child, 'A Merry-go-round for
Megan'. These all add light and shade to an enjoyable volume, but I still
feel vaguely uneasy at being made to observe a gilded, epicene set loitering
along the Backs at Cambridge: should we still be harking back to students in
the cold 1950s ? A chiller, shriller wind whistles around today's
undergraduates as they pore over bank statements and read unsympathetic
headlines in the daily newspapers and, much as I enjoy Scupham's verse, I
wondered at its relevance.
© M.C. Caseley 2011
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