The Ark is Peter Scupham's latest collection of poems, following his Selected Poems and Watching the Perseids , both published by OUP in 1990. The poems explore questions hovering on the borderlines of `is' and `seems', life and death, truth and lies. His Ark is steered to `its safe and certain loss' with a freight of dreams, memories, terrors, gifts; it is a habitation that carries him through varied landscapes and weathers to a possible Ararat. Three very different sequences hold the collection together: an experimental sequence, `Accident', followed by `Annunciations', and `A Habitat', a group of poems loosely surrounding the retrieval of an old house from its ghostly past. This book is intended for readers of comtemporary poetry.