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Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool in 1933. He is married with four children and now lives in Hitchin where, with John Mole he has run for many years the Mandeville Press. Peter Scupham's new book of poems - his seventh - brings together the themes of childhood and war: themes which seem naturally connected to Scupham, who was himself a child during the Second World War. The intense rumours, sights and sounds of war accompany his move from Derby to a Cambridgeshire village, and are ever-present during his holidays with grandparents in Lincolnshire. Old toys, period postcards, and revisiting places of the past all help him in his attempt to crack 'Enigma', the coded complex of signals transmitted by the child he once was. He describes the details of a young boy's domestic and natural world with an almost hallucinatory precision and beauty, yet the treasured memories of childhood possess disturbing undertones, and the details lead, more often than not, to the world at war.
Peter Scupham is among the most distinguished poets to have emerged in England during the 1970s. Even in a period not easily categorized by literary groupings, his is a strikingly individual talent: partly because he began to write relatively late (he was never that vain and vulnerable creature, the young poet); partly because his concerns have, as we shall see, more to do with history and continuity than with the ephemeral present; and partly because his fondness for timeless formal structures owes little to contemporary fashions.
John Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool, to John and Dorothy Clark Scupham, but spent his childhood in Cambridgeshire. He was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge; at St. George's, Harpenden; and, after national service, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read English, graduating with honors in 1957. His father was an educationist who became controller of BBC Educational Broadcasting; this background may have something to do with the son's dislike of his schooldays and distrust of education in general. Nevertheless, after teaching at a grammar school in Lincolnshire from 1957 to 1961, Peter Scupham became a successful and highly original teacher of English at St. Christopher School,Letchworth. He married Carola Nance Braunholtz on 10 August 1957. The younger two of their four children are currently undergraduates at Oxford and London universities; he lives in Hitchin, where he runs a fine small press (The Mandeville Press) and writes, as he has said, "in a room where the most disparate objects, an Etruscan bronze, a grey felt mouse, a microscope, a sixteenth century bible, live in a chosen harmony.... The room contains the centuries, and I feel acutely ill-at-ease in places where now is the only dimension visible; life is a texture where past and present become each other."
...Since Scupham's interest in historical continuities and his delight in formal poetic structures are unfashionable, it is no surprise to find that his books have been given a rough ride by some fashionable reviewers. Paradoxically, his refusal to write aggressively controversial poems has been the cause of some aggressive controversy; while the technical virtuosity of "The Hinterland" prompted Craig Raine in the Observer to compare the sequence to "a constriction suit" and Colin Falck in the New Review to associate himself with "Readers who suspect that this may be the kind of foolery that gets poetry a bad name." Other reviewers have complained, with more justice, that some poems are marred by overornate or unnecessarily recondite language. Nevertheless, Scupham evidently enjoys the support of some leading magazine editors, a distinguished publisher, and a loyal readership. His concern with poetic craftsmanship should enable him to outlast many flimsier and more modish writers. But perhaps his greatest asset is that deep cultural-historical taproot, so unusual and so welcome at a time when English poetry can seem to be a rather shallow-rooted plant.
-- Powell, Neil. "John Peter Scupham." Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Since 1960. Ed. Vincent B. Sherry. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 40. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Literature Resource Center. Gale.
