Rory Waterman, "Come Here to This Gate"

 

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up mainly in Lincolnshire. His fourth full-length collection, Come Here to This Gate, has just been published by Carcanet Press. His other collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; and Sweet Nothings (2020). He is also regularly a critic for the TLS, PN Review and other publications, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He co-edits New Walk Editions with Nick Everett at the University of Leicester. He has a BA and PhD from the University of Leicester. Since 2012, he has worked at Nottingham Trent University, where he is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and leads the MA in Creative Writing. He lives in Nottingham. His website is here. 

About Come Here to This Gate
Come Here to This Gate, Rory Waterman's fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: "your silences were trains departing." The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet's rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a "doll left behind at Chernobyl" must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.

You can read more about Come Here to This Gate on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the book on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Come here to This Gate, by Rory Waterman

Home

T-shirt weather today: a bumble bee bumps
the window, and the door of the visiting room
yawns and nudges a pot. We could go out,
sniff freedom over the fence. You’d rather not.

‘You’ve come to take me home?’ No, Dad. I’ve come
to bring it to you, blind on your piss-proof seat
on wheels, most of you a line of little knots
beneath a blanket. Stop-gap Clov to your Hamm – 

you’d get that, and it wouldn’t help – I ask 
someone to bring your sippy cup, some biscuits,
and you chew them in the back of your open mouth
in quiet, ‘thinking,’ too afraid to talk.

So I watch the ridge of your forehead, feel my own – 
for impulse, or connection, which doesn’t come
until a nurse does, panting, to the door, 
to tell us darlings we have five minutes more. 

         (first published in the Times Literary Supplement)

ICN to LHR

‘Keep the reunified Korea in your heart’
an old man had said, palming his chest. And 
okay, I do. And there it stays, doing nothing 

as flight KE 907 to London lifts 
from a (re)claimed island, over (re)claimed islands
stacked with containers: a concreted sarcophagus,

the memorial to Operation Chromite,
which has no other memorial. A child beside me
pulls down her mask, is chastened, frumps.

‘We’re progress,’ he had added. See it down there,
a phosphoresced capital washing round its hills,
a land of neon chaebols and kimchi jars

where new friends complete the circuits
of their lives for Samsung, Lotte, Hyundai,
as I complete this circuit for Hanjin.

See the sea ooze the yellow they don’t call it 
here – there – with silt from China, as we skirt
North Korean airspace. This land is your land

I hum before noticing. Far towns are like colonies
of barnacles; dark fishing vessels ply 
what looks turbid. And when we start to cross

the safety of China, from where this – that – 
is ordained, a city (Shenyang?) shifts, 
a molten web in new night. Now there will be

nothing but black, the dark familiar nowhere, 
and then the grind of lowering, the misted plots
of ruined nametagged earth around our lives.

Alan Jenkins, "The Ghost Net"

New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester, is publishing its first full-length poetry collection, The Ghost Net, by Alan Jenkins. 

Alan Jenkins was born in 1955, and has lived in London for most of his life. He has worked as an editor, reviewer and teacher in England, Europe and the United States, and published several volumes of poetry, among them the Forward Prize-winning Harm (1994), A Shorter Life (2005), Revenants (2013) and Marine (a collaboration with John Kinsella, 2015). New Walk Editions published his chapbook Tidemarks in 2018.

About The Ghost Net

A ghost net is a fishing net, or part of one, that remains in the sea after it has been discarded or lost. Alan Jenkins’s eighth full collection of original poems (and his first for a decade) has netted a haul of painful or poignant moments and memories: places and people recalled vividly, sometimes obsessively, in sorrow and in anger. Central to these are an unnamed woman – or women – and the journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria in 2012. But the paths and ‘sea-roads’ here beckon us insistently back into a past that is not merely personal: The Ghost Net is haunted by a sense of loss in which, as a reviewer of Jenkins’s New Walk chapbook Tidemarks pointed out, a nation and the way it sees itself are implicated. And the elegiac music so distinctive to this poet is accompanied by the wit, telling detail and powerful directness that make reading him a rare pleasure.

You can see more details about The Ghost Net on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Ghost Net, by Alan Jenkins

A Song of Maine

It seemed absurd,
To be flying up to Maine,
An ‘honoured guest’, the week I’d heard
That my life would never be the same again,
That the time had come to pay for every word
I’d let go in unkindness, or in haste,
Every chance I’d let go to waste,
Each drag, each drunken fuck,
Each drop of booze,
Each bit of undeserved good luck
I’d somehow refused to use;
 
That I who’d been
The doctor, was now the disease ...
Could I have known, could I have seen
How I’d mislay that knack I had, to please
By a sort of laying on of hands?
Or, now that I had lost my touch
So that a single touch of mine appalled,
And everything came down to cells and glands,
How much, how much
I’d need you, or that when you called
To say I wasn’t real, what that would mean?

I sat and stared
At the grey Atlantic, at
The grey mist that rolled unimpaired
Over pines and firs, grey rock and where I sat –
A granite perch on Schooner Head, a deck I shared
With foxes, squirrels and a grey raccoon
– Its mask of sadness; at the moon,
Most nights, as it sailed through
A storm-rinsed sky
To mock me and my need for you,
Absurd as that seemed, to its eye.

 
Player’s Navy

I work to make my flat proof against the winters,
My flat roof, my skylights and window-frames,
Unhelped by him, who gave our claims the slip ...
When I kneel to strip the rough planks of my flooring,
Sanding when the soiled, soaked rag snags on splinters,
My head swims with the shining decks of twelve, thirteen;
With white spirit and the whiff of coiled rope. I see him
Straighten up to light another Player’s Navy Cut,
Snap the lighter shut and smooth his moustache-ends
With the back of his hand. I tell myself we were friends
As I reel home after drinking all night in The Ship,
Make my window-latches fast, batten down the hatches
Of my skylights then keel over in the wrack
Of oily rags, the reek of the years that I want back
And listen to the room creak and strain at its mooring.
 

Rory Waterman, "Sweet Nothings"

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up in rural Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham, where he is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. He has a BA and a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Leicester. His first collection of poetry, Tonight the Summer's Over, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. His second, Sarajevo Roses, was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for second collections. The poems featured below are taken from his third book, Sweet Nothings, published by Carcanet this month. He is also the author  of several books on modern poetry, and co-edits New Walk Editions. You can find out more about Rory and his work at www.rorywaterman.com.

Sweet Nothings, his new collection, 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.

Until 28 May, you can get 25% off the cover price of the book at www.carcanet.co.uk, if you enter the code WATERMAN25 at checkout.

Here are some poems from the collection:


Reaping

          ‘We need to test harder whether we can take a young 18- or 19-year-old out of their 
          PlayStation bedroom, and put them into a Reaper cabin and say: “Right, you have 
          never flown an aircraft before. That does not matter, you can operate this.”’

- Air Marshal Greg Bagwell

18 or 19 – what was I doing then? 
Well, one day, I biked here 
to RAF Waddington’s ‘viewing point’, 

from where I saw no action –
called by the urgent Tornados
which had skimmed our village 

shocking pliant heads
at intervals of my childhood,
and must have come from somewhere.

Runway approach lights have switched on
and point skywards at nothing 
coming in. A pigeon. A slip of moon.

A screech owl would be too apposite. 
But I saw one once a mile from here,
on Bloxholm Lane. It stalled a moment, 

then beat on past the hedges
tall as houses, living its purpose
suddenly beyond range.

And who knows what they do 
in a concreted cube two hundred yards
behind wires and warning signs,

or who does it – or why
an inch from where it would have died
a sandfly fills its nest?

Grasses by the road 
dip like a million rods 
to a million tiny catches. A saloon

half a mile off indicates 
only to the clouding dusk,
slows to corner the perimeter

on a red route B road to home. 
Nothing to do but follow
at a generous distance.


First published in PN Review. 



Where to Build

I never thought I’d have a home
but then I’d built one up from the bay,
a shrub-scrubbed cleft half-hiding it,
a plunging stream behind the grate

and locals pointed up, or down,
to where I lived beside myself
for years, with all I’d wanted most,
building a greenhouse, annexe, shelves, 

and made it all I knew to want
and drowned the voice that said I don’t
with all I’d always done for this
and grew tomatoes, seed to light

and ate them, happily, every night,
and fixed the leak that drew the rain
and fixed it when it sprung again.
Well, I knew of rock across the bay – 

a skerry? – green-topped, curving round
to out of sight behind near rock.
But rain set in, the endless rain,
and through the sheet of endless cloud

a jet of sudden light cracked down
across that further hunk of land,
which glimmered ginger. And it stayed
for seconds, minutes, hours, days,

the whole life of my house away.


First published in the Times Literary Supplement. 


Re: Application

FAO Dr Bob Pintle
Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University

Dear Robert,
                    The Board regrets to inform
several colleagues, including you,
that your recent sabbatical applications
will not go forward, after review.

The panel felt that ‘Write some poems
I haven’t yet written, so it’s absurd
to say much else’ lacked requisite rigour.
We do ask for ‘No more than 2000 words’

but suitable answers require something close.
We advise you attend our ‘Winning Support for
Sabbaticals Workshop’, when places are open.
There are none at present. We’ll advertise more

when we secure funding. To raise an objection,
write to your Sub-Dean of Sub-Research. State
your grounds for appeal, in accordance with Guideline
11 6 2 (Staff Handbook, page 8).

Ensure your 4* REF Output Agreement
and book contract are both attached to the email,
with endorsements from two Student Reps and your Mentor,
and a piece of your heart. Should your first appeal fail,

we invite fresh applications each year,
though from March 2020, all will be screened
for written support from Lead Industry Partners
linked to our Strategy Goals. We are keen

to support your research. We value team players
and wish you every success going forward.
Lastly, I’m pleased, on a personal note,
to congratulate you on your Teaching Award

(Bronze.) Our Faculty Press Team will write
a blog post next week, and request you take part
in our new poster ad, so congratulations!
Yours,
Dr Jim Jones
Dean, School of Arts


First published in Wild Court. 


Re: Re: Application

FAO Dr Jim Jones
Dean of Arts, Peterborough University

Hi Jim, Bob pecks, then deletes. Dear Jim, Oh YES!
I’ll write with that! Those sabbaticals: who got them?
And have those colleagues had thirteen precious years
on what you term ‘the front line’? Anyway, Cheers!
When I find time, I’ll thank you in a poem,
and place it in the fucking TLS.

I see you proclaim in your email signature line
you’re ‘often abroad and send out-of-hours emails,
but rarely expect instant replies to them.’ 
Well, Jim, tonight I marked till 10pm:
Rhetoric essays. I’d give your email a Fail,
you shite-backfilled and heaving cliché-mine.

On a personal note, how are the kids, you knob?
See much of them? Does Nanny wipe their arses?
And what are the call girls like out in Guangdong?
He sighs. Holds backspace till all his work is gone.
The cursor blinks along with his catharsis,
and he stabs Dear Jim, That’s excellent! Thanks. Bob.


First published in Wild Court. 


You can also watch Rory perform one of his poems here.
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