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The poems in Rory Waterman's debut collection Tonight the Summer's
Over explore belonging and estrangement with precise resonance.
Born in Belfast and brought up in rural Lincolnshire, Waterman
turns an unblurred eye on his own childhood, caught between two
countries, two cultures, two parents. Yet his poems are never mere
autobiography: they are rooted in a broader concern for the
inconsistencies of human experience. Tonight the Summer's Over
becomes a book of love and hope: 'Lift the purest feather from the
wreck. / Ignore the seagulls laughing against the sky.'
Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship
in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory
Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley
epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of
their age. Waterman looks at the foundations underpinning their
poetry; the attempts of all three to forge a sense of belonging
with or separateness from their readers; the poets' varying
responses to their geographical and cultural origins; the belonging
and estrangement that inheres in relationships, including marriage;
the forced estrangements of war; the antagonism between social
belonging and a need for isolation; and, finally, the charged
issues of faith and mortality in an increasingly secularized
country.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second
Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman's second collection of
poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move.
On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into
Mediterranean Europe, to Palma's Bellver Castle, to Venice, to
Kruje, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter's Basilica
in Vatican City, where `selfie-sticks dance before us at the
altar'. Sarajevo's `neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete' is
twinned with the `church spires and rain-bright roofs' of the
poet's former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book's
title - a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance - is
less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past
inscribed upon the present - culturally in our architecture,
individually on our bodies - and of the instinct to preserve wounds
as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped,
memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller
wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers,
friends, relations, and past selves.
It is a commonly held belief that, other than the work of Keith
Douglas and perhaps Alun Lewis, the Second World War (1939 - 1945)
inspired hardly any poetry of merit, and certainly little to
compare to the poets of the Great War of 1914 - 1918. Even in the
early 1940s, the literary press in Britain was asking, 'Where are
the war poets?' This book addresses why that might have been so, as
well as providing ample evidence that the conflict did in fact
inspire some of the finest poetry of the twentieth century. It
looks in detail at several of the most notable English- language
poets of that war, and also provides an overview of the other
remarkable poetry about it, helping readers to evaluate the true
significance of the Second World War on English-language poetry.
Wendy Cope is one of Britain’s most popular poets: her first two
collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in
1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners’ choice to
succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes
controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest
parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising,
then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical
near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only
piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This
is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's
published work, archival material and correspondence, Rory Waterman
considers her main collections, her works for children and her
uncollected poems, with many close readings, and detailed
considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic
development.
Sweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes
what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably
present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by
absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable
phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in
dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between
the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently
personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also
encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at
work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of
the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero
football score, the zero scores in life's more significant
conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for
nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact
a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also
fiercely witty and bold.
The publication of this anthology comes a year into the Covid-19
pandemic. In the summer of 2020, we invited nineteen UK poets to
partner with poets from around the world, to work collaboratively
on poems responding to the virus. The poems herein are as personal
as they are communal, and as local as they are international.
Between them, the writers reside in all of the world's permanently
populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit
us everywhere. Their diversities of aesthetics and poetics, of
Covid experiences - at a distance and/or embodied, anecdotal and/or
dramatic - are further significant to their inclusion and their
work. The pairs of contributors are: Sinéad Morrissey and Jan
Wagner (trans. Iain Galbraith); Carol Leeming and Rakhshan Rizwan;
George Szirtes and Alvin Pang; Vahni Capildeo and Vivek Narayanan;
Rory Waterman and Togara Muzanenhamo; Rachael Allen and Ilya
Kaminsky; Zoë Skoulding and Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo; Inua Ellams
and Omar Musa; Matthew Welton and Hazel Smith; Vidyan Ravinthiran
and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Anthony Caleshu and Mariko Nagai;
Selima Hill and Wang Xiaoni (trans. Eleanor Goodman); Declan Ryan
and Linda Stern Zisquit; David Herd and Sharmistha Mohant; Luke
Kennard and Hwang Yu Won (trans. Jake Levine); André Naffis-Sahely
and Stacy Hardy; Harriet Tarlo and Craig Santos Pérez; Jennifer
Cooke and Jèssica Pujol Duran; Momtaza Mehri and A. E. Stallings.
Wendy Cope is one of Britain's most popular poets: her first two
collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in
1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners' choice to
succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes
controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest
parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising,
then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical
near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only
piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This
is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's
published work, archival material and correspondence, Rory Waterman
considers her main collections, her works for children and her
uncollected poems, with many close readings, and detailed
considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic
development.
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