Peter Scupham’s eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the Battle of Arras, Kilvert’s Diary, and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful fictions explore meeting points and intersections between `is’ and `was’, or `is’ and `might be’. The centre of the book is a substantial sequence, `The Northern Line’, where the poet’s double, in his old guise as a National Serviceman, takes a journey by ghost train through the 1950s, that hinge of the century when the trouble of great wars gave way to the troubles of a patchwork peace.

Peter Scupham was born in 1933. With John Mole he founded The Mandeville Press and now lectures, writes, and runs Mermaid Books, a second-hand book business in Norfolk. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.