Peter Scupham recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday and the publication of his fifth collection of poems, Winter Quarters (OUP, £4.50). In this conversation, recorded in his Hertfordshire home, he talked to Neil Powell.

Neil Powell - If your five books so far have a pattern, it seems to be a pattern which begins with domestic themes and nature, deepens into the historical and geological, and then gradually works forward to your most recent book. How far is this a conscious pattern?

Peter Scupham - Yes, it is conscious after The Snowing Globe, which is an odd book and rather a mish-mash, a trial of different styles; I think bits of The Snowing Globe are in all the other books. The first OUP book, Prehistories, was a conscious attempt to go back to origins: I've always been a person who's felt only marginally at home in the twentieth century and who's had to reach the twentieth century by a long and in some ways rather cumbersome process. And so, since geological and prehistoric time are things which had always fascinated me (originally I was going to be a historian rather than read English at a university), Prehistories did home in on sign-languages from the world of pre-written record. Then The Hinterland, which came after it, did attempt to move in some sense through recorded history - not a very twentieth-century set of themes in either of the two books. Then, because I ...