Poet, bookseller and Royal Society of Literature fellow Peter Scupham dies aged 89

Poet, bookseller and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Peter Scupham has died aged 89, his publisher Carcanet has announced. 

Scupham passed away on 11th June at his home in Norfolk. His partner Margaret Stewart said he died "very quietly, with the sunshine pouring through the open French windows".

She said: "His son, partner and myself were with him. It was as if he saw his book into publication... and was then happy to let go. We read from the book as he lay there, as well as playing him his favourite Fats Waller.”

Carcanet published Scupham’s Collected Poems this year as well as Borrowed Landscapes in 2011. His final collection, Invitation to View, is forthcoming on 28th July. Carcanet said: “It was with relief that we delivered finished copies of the new book to him shortly before his death.” 

Scupham, born in Liverpool in 1933, published more than 10 collections of poetry in his lifetime as well as founding The Mandeville Press with John Mole. He also ran Mermaid Books, a second-hand book business in Norfolk. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 1996. 

Michael Schmidt, founder and m.d. of Carcanet Press, said: “Peter Scupham is a poet I loved almost from my arrival in the UK. He was a superlative second-hand bookseller whose Mermaid Books catalogues are harmonies of erudition and hilarity and whose prices were always within my range. His envelopes he often decorated with drawings that added to the merriment of his correspondence. The garden of the Old Hall that he and Margaret Stewart restored was a gathering-place for poets, with summer Shakespeare performances and a permanent welcome. 

“He was published first by Peterloo Poets, Harry Chambers’ Manchester operation and then by OUP. And when Carcanet took over the OUP poetry list, he became formally ours. He was already a central figure in our magazine PN Review, to which he contributed from our very first issue in 1973 and to which he continued contributing until yesterday, as it were. We celebrated his work as a poet, bookseller and eccentric Englishman on his 85th birthday in 2018 with a special supplement.

“He and his friend John Mole were proper, inky-fingered publishers, with letterpress and hand-stitching, and their Mandeville Press produced handsome and significant pamphlets and the legendary Dragon Cards.

“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.”

His last 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.

In a blog for Carcanet, he wrote: “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.”

“Peter’s death is a great loss for all at Carcanet, and the poetry community at large,” Schmidt said. “He will be remembered for his poetic energy and trademark wit, which were bright until the end."