Summer palaces

de Peter Scupham

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.