In the green boat: RIP Peter Scupham

I was very sorry to read of the death last week of the poet Peter Scupham, at age 89. I met him only once, ten years ago, but it was for a whole weekend, at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival: like a sort of big house party with readings and dinners, run by the wonderful Tony Ellis. Peter, there with his partner Margaret, was friendly, kind, witty, interested, and very much a sort of beneficent, jolly presence.

The effervescence and power of his personality loom large in the email Carcanet sent out the other day announcing his death. Describing him as a ‘superlative second-hand bookseller’ (at Mermaid Books), Michael Schmidt writes:

Few poets in my experience are as generous, as cheerful and as formally inventive and accomplished as Peter. As he lay preparing for death, I asked him to record some of his new poems, from his last book Invitation to View. He roused himself and with his usual smiling precision of voice read them. Margaret recorded them for all time on her telephone and they will soon be shared with the world, along with a fine tribute by John Mole.

The same freshness of spirit runs through his work: his reading that weekend was one of those that you want to pay close attention to every word of. Technically complex and seemingly flawless. Absolutely conversational iambics. Densely woven sound, so the poem is a carpet you’d trust to hold your weight. Poems that could seem merely colloquial, but you want to look again, because they play on your mind, wisps of ghosts rolling through them that you’re not sure whether you saw or not. 

When the starting question for the festival’s closing event, the Sunday morning panel debate, was announced — ‘To what, if anything, is the poet responsible?’ — it was Peter Scupham who quick as a flash answered it: ‘Why, to nothing but the poem, of course!’ This was not a position I fully agreed with, but his end of the panel all took it up with enthusiasm. There was a different mood, I think, at the other end, which included Matthew Caley, and me, and a couple of others. It all got a bit heated, with talk of Caves of Making, whether or not one can write proper poetry while holding down a job, and whether or not being a parent has any bearing on it — I can see why someone’s responsibility is ‘to the poem’, but I can’t see that that’s their only responsibility. It seemed like a generational divide. And Peter was cheerful and generous throughout. I didn’t want to disagree with him…

It was a brilliant weekend, and I have two collections signed by him to show for it. I’m glad that he made it to 89, and even gladder in some ways that he had just finished a new collection, which is due out in July (Invitation to View). According to Carcanet:

This new work is characterised by Scupham’s poetic energy and trademark wit. Its poems consider possible visitors to the poet’s 400 year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind, delighting in the efforts these visitors make to bring the house and garden alive, from poetry picnics to productions of Shakespeare. Other poems respond to fragments of the past, both personal and historical, as they haunt the present.

For the Carcanet blog, Peter writes: ‘When Margaret and I bought a semi-derelict and ramshackle Tudor house perched in long grass on the edge of nowhere, we eventually opened it under a scheme called ‘Invitation to View’. The house and its putting together is one of the themes in this collection, but the Invitation is seen as made by our ghosts, when what we have done and made is just one more arrangement of tantalising dust and wilderness. That invitation set apart, I would not want this book to be about studying one’s x -ray plates in a deck chair, or making cumbrous farewells. I hope there is a spring lyricism, albeit tempered by a certain wintery nip.

In the meantime, in a similar sort of vein, here is the poem we discussed in this week’s Thursday lunchtime close reading session, ‘Monet’s Garden’, from his collection The Ark (Oxford Poets, 1994):

Monet’s Garden

The old man stepped out of his studio,
Ridiculous tin car, unfinishings,
Leaving some dignity of beards and ladies
To keep the past and its bucolic engines
For those to whom black is a favourite colour,
Who drain themselves back into photographs.

He asked if we had come to see some flowers,
He’d tidied up the kitchen, scorched it yellow,
Invited Hokusai and Hiroshige
To climb like cats on every wall and stairway,
And told his pictures how to turn themselves
Into the sizes that would fit our pockets.

His flowers rippled gently in the sunlight.
He sat in the green boat he called the garden
And rocked it softly. Crumbly at the edges,
The shadows whispered in a foreign language,
And all the flowers we picked and pressed in childhood
Were there for us to pick and press, in camera,

As white and bridal as our mothers’ trousseaux,
As pink and blue as an Edwardian nursery.
The lily-heads came floating u at us
Out of that tumbler full of painting water
In which we used to dip our sable brushes
In long and hot imaginary summers.

He waited for us under hoops, down alleys,
In a pink house pinned up with open shutters.
What could we cay to him, to Monsieur Money,
Except we thought it pretty as a picture?
He thanked us, out of radiance and silver;
A ghost can make white light out of a rainbow.

I love how this poem is so gentle, peaceful, almost holding us in the green boat, as it slips through time and dimensions, and everything is there all at once. It feels old-fashioned, like an old-fashioned project that we’ve forgotten about now — maybe we don’t feel it’s something we can have — of poetry bing in some way about, or to do with, beauty. A poem about beauty, about the experience of being in it. And about making it. We had a deep & wide-ranging discussion. Not about responsibility as such, but if you read this poem with the poet's responsibility in mind, you can see he has taken full responsibility: for the effect, for the technique, for the heart of it. He's, in essence, made a sort of Monet painting out of words.

It also reminds me of the LM Boston’s Green Knowe books, about a manor house and the children who live in it through the centuries. The past is passing away, and it’s also — even now, in the age of AI and armageddon — still here. It’s all fine. I don’t know which poets of this generation are still alive. How wonderful to go out with a forthcoming collection only weeks away.

Of course, the ghost is himself as well as Monet; as the poem seems to say, with its silvery light and colour and unnamed flowers and insubstance, we are all ghosts in waiting, all one.