Collected Poems
by Peter Scupham
472pp, Carcanet Oxford Poets, £30

The tombstones that are "collected poems" lie heavy, unless one heaves them off with a certain regularity, as Robert Graves used to do. The grand patterns of development rise into relief: the figure in the carpet emerges as an almost complete likeness. The figure in Peter Scupham's carpet is certainly English, and of a particular generation, which is to say that, born in 1933, he is of an age with Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Peter Redgrove. Together they represent related yet distinct aspects of Englishness. Hill is the closest in texture to Scupham, the earlier Hill of Tenebrae and the Christian architecture poems.

Lines such as Hill's "tremulous boudoirs where the crystal kissed / in cabinets of amethyst and frost" are answered by Scupham with "The moths are sealed: they quicken to a tumult. / Their wing-tips bruise on walls of ice and jet."

Both poets owe a strong debt to Tennyson and the line packed with ore at every rift, but while Hill's tendency is to move out to a sweeping grandeur or an ascetic absoluteness of statement, Scupham's is to close in on detail. It is not so much the devil as the whole interior life of Scupham's formidably crafted first five or six books humming and thriving there. As a body of work, there is a marked, almost stage by stage, sense of purpose in the successive volumes.

Those that brought him his reputation in the 1970s begin with Prehistories, which deals with rocks, stones and monuments, an English landscape of archaeologies; continue with The Hinterland whose chief subject is history, climaxing with the long complex title poem about the first world war; extend through Summer Palaces, a book full of images of dust, clouds and the flittery world of theatre; and so we go on, each book with a theme that is signalled by its predecessor, moving slowly into autobiography via his own spell of national service, through childhood memories of the second world war, the death of his parents, and, recently, to the notion of the frail shelter that holds everything together in The Ark.

What will strike readers of the earlier books presented in this comprehensive Collected Poems, is the characteristic interplay between the rich, buzzing, highly dynamic material stuffed into the lines and the firmly end-stopped, often pentametric carapaces of their arrangement. It is as if something were moving and stopping at once, all indoor fireworks within; all ice, rituals and discipline without.

This is heartland Scupham, with a strong debt to Auden, Graves and Tennyson, and not a million miles from John Heath-Stubbs on the one hand, and Hill on the other. The stanza form that best encapsulates this is the six-liner, rhyming ABABCC. There is a conscious touch of neat ceremoniousness in it with its hammering home of the final chime. It is, in effect, a performance involving courtesy and sententiousness and, importantly, a kind of magic. After a short ritual waving of the hands the rabbit appears.

The very first poem in the collection proper mentions a figure "who seems to skate off the sides of his head" ("Man on the Edge"): what haunts him is the violent sense of the vulnerability of the intimate world, a domestic framework that is at once trap and ark, a bombed house full of childhood nightmares, distances and double-edged obligations. This house represents culture and what that frail culture shelters. One should say that the walls of this house, ornate and haunted as they are, are far from all-inclusive. Though the paraphernalia within, which extend into the well-kept Romantic garden, are comprised of many numinous individual items, there is very little contemporary flotsam there. The furnishings, seen in a certain light, are faintly whimsical and fantastic: more Rex Whistler than Francis Bacon, more Mervyn Peake than John Braine.

Nor is Scupham's any kind of street language. It is as if he were continually conscious of what the ghost of his recently dead father tells him: "'That,' / my father says, 'is tomfoolery, and you know it - / the sort of remark you'd expect from a minor poet.'" ("Family Reunion"). Well, a talent for silver is nothing to be ashamed of but, if at one end of his work, the parodist, the Victorian, the Austin Dobson of the light trifle, jangle their small change, the soldiers of the first world war nevertheless pile forward into their graves, the children burn in Lincoln and Dresden, and the seismic disorderly forces of nature, seen as light, rock, forest or mountain, continue to press at the limits of the familiar.

Nature unadorned and insensible, the second world war childhood and the immediate and lingering deaths of people close to him, cast Scupham up on shores that are not as consciously silver or minor, where the trappings of a rare yet familiar culture help but cannot altogether shape the rescuing ark. The mandarin and the antiquarian, the fore-edge painting and the Latin inscription, the English sang-froid and the distantly twinkling lights of wheeling constellations and of the late empire, symbolise powers, orders and manners, but nature is indifferent to them, firebombs flatten them, and the voices of the dying invoke them only to confuse and accuse.

The consciousness of this state of affairs is always there, even in the early poems, but chiefly as intuition and theory: their sheer blunt power arrives only later.

I don't think there are finer poems about the effect of the second world war on an active developing imagination than those in The Air Show section: the grotesquerie and the familiarity are horribly and convincingly out of kilter. The miniaturist antiquarian who has engraved Shakespeare on five perfectly polished fingernails and filled out a vast library about mortality on onion-skin paper, finds his roots and causes partly here. There are no finer poems about attending on death and driving through the night than the sonnets in "The Christmas Midnight" from Watching the Perseids, and the voice of the dying father in the sequence a few poems on, a sequence that blows the delicacies of the miniaturist sky high, is unforgettable.

For someone whose early strength was a vast stock of quotable lines, these sequences extend beyond quotability and elegy into large unwritten territories. If we think about them as the large unwritten territories of a specifically English life and history, it will help us to see Scupham next to his contemporaries Hill, Hughes, and Redgrove, and to define what is remarkable, oddly romantic, even visionary, about an apparently desolate culture that remains stubbornly alive.

· George Szirtes's An English Apocalypse is published by Bloodaxe