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Invitation to View

Peter Scupham

Cover of Invitation to View by Peter Scupham
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (88 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2022)
9781800172104
£11.99 £10.79
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2022)
9781800172111
£9.59 £8.63
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  • Description
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  • 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.'
    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 ... read more
    'A collection in which perception often trembles on the edge of the liminal.' 

    Carol Rumens, the Guardian where 'Reflection' was Poem of the Week

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