Summer palaces
By: Peter Scupham.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1980
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 55
First sentence: It is, after all, only a collection of leaves.  / Hours bring...
Description: In Summer Palaces, PS's eloquent and elaborate style, once decribed by Roger Garfitt 'as a stratagem, a way of of writing affirmative poetry in a cynical age', lends itself to a collection of greater variety than before. A book of epiphanies, celebrations and elegies, in which the sense of history is lighty carried, it is built around four poem sequences, TS, CC, MW and N (cf Contents below). Another group, on amateur theatricals from front and backstage, provides a subject which seems particularly well-suited to Scupham's preception of the mixture of illusion and actuality. The central imagery of his poetry is drawn from the natural world, but a world transformed by the eyes of a child, the standing stones on a moorland, or the elusive appearances of the geni loci, the spirits of place.
Table of contents: label: 1
title: Six poems
pagenum: 001; label: 2
title: Three Sisters (TS)
pagenum: 007; label: 3
title: Five poems
pagenum: 010; label: 4
title: A Cambridgeshire Childhood (CC)
pagenum: 017; label: 5
title: Five poems
pagenum: 025; label: 6
title: Megalitha and Water (MW)
pagenum: 030; label: 7
title: Eight poems
pagenum: 034; label: 8
title: Natura (A)
pagenum: 042