Invitation to View (Paperback)

Peter Scupham

ISBN 10: 1800172109 / ISBN 13: 9781800172104

Published by Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester, 2022

About this Item

Paperback. The poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scupham's hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling 'Curtain Call', often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and historical, which haunt the present. All business is unfinished business: one can be caught out by a sudden phrase, or the look back of a landscape once seen sporting a different disguise. Invitation to View is framed by poems considering possible visitors to the poet's 400-year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind; it is haunted by the variety of the efforts and gestures they have made in bringing house and garden alive. Time will do its best to modify and forget all that they leave. Many gestures were theatrical: poetry picnics, productions of Shakespeare. the dead welcomed with the living. Tom Stoppard's words from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can provide an absent epigraph: 'Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.' The poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scuphams hugely welcome new book, often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781800172104

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Invitation to View (Paperback)
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1800172109
• ISBN 13: 9781800172104
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

The poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scupham's hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling 'Curtain Call,' often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and historical, which haunt the present. All business is unfinished business: one can be caught out by a sudden phrase, or the look back of a landscape once seen sporting a different disguise. Invitation to View is framed by poems considering possible visitors to the poet's 400-year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind; it is haunted by the variety of the efforts and gestures they have made in bringing house and garden alive. Time will do its best to modify and forget all that they leave. Many gestures were theatrical: poetry picnics, productions of Shakespeare... the dead welcomed with the living. Tom Stoppard's words from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can provide an absent epigraph: 'Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.'

About the Author

Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool in 1933. Since 1972 he published over ten collections of poetry. With John Mole he founded The Mandeville Press and ran Mermaid Books, a second-hand book business in Norfolk. He received a Cholmondely Award in 1996 and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His 2022 Collected Poems was followed by Borrowed Landscapes in 2011. His final collection, Invitation to View, is published by Carcanet in July 2022. He passed away in June 2022 at the age of 88.