Review - Rory Waterman - Come Here to this Gate
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up mostly in Lincolnshire, in eastern England. His debut collection, Tonight the Summer's Over (Carcanet, 2013), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize 2014. His second, Sarajevo Roses, shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize, was published by Carcanet in September 2017. Sweet Nothings was also published by Carcanet in 2020.
In recent years his poems have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The Best British Poetry, PN Review, the Guardian, Financial Times, etc. He is also a reviewer for literary publications such as the TLS, and the author of three books of criticism about twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and he co-edits New Walk Editions. He is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
I first met Rory at a reading for Read to Write and was lucky enough to have him submit three poems from this collection, prior to publication, for a Featured Poet slot in my webzine The Fig Tree. You can read them here.
Come Here to this Gate is a collection in three parts, seemingly disconnected in theme but when you study the poems there are threads running through the collection that bind it together.
In the beginning there is a short standalone poem about the border in Korea, giving us a glimpse (perhaps the poem is itself a portal) into the theme of the collection.
The first part addresses the final year in the life of his father, Andrew Waterman. It’s pretty unflinching and contains quite a few “wish I’d written that” lines. Examples from Prelude
the hand that prodded his a month ago
that couldn’t uncoil the fingers now pared to ash
and boxed in my boot, with no where else to go
and from Alcoholic Dementia
The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches
This section opens a gate between the present, or at least the recent present, and the past, where young Rory is struggling to understand the relationship with “Daddy”, who had clearly behaved very badly and yet did create some good memories for the boy. Despite knowing the truth of his past actions, older Rory is supporting his now blind father in his care home through an awful, albeit self-inflicted, illness. A great poem from this section is Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard where Rory attends his father’s best friend’s funeral, from which his father is excluded.
So I think of you,
straggled across that bed (some buttered toast
untouched beside you, perhaps, as it was that morning)
a mile away, gasping at the fumes of a faith
or pining to be senseless? I don’t know.
In the final poem of section, Coda, one Rory reveals he has recorded all their last “conversations”.
But as you weakened, I was company,
and so were you. Your little mouthpiece breath
like sea on radio.
These poems are tender, but there is no mawkish sentimentality as there are reminders of the bouts of anger and frustration that complicated this relationship from the start. This gate is closed now, but Rory can open it whenever he needs to.
Section two is called Come Here to this Gate, as is the opening poem that takes us on a tour of borders, from Ireland to a refugee camp, to Korea, where Waterman spent a year as a writer in residence and where a number of poems are set.
Quite a few poems in this section rhyme, which is done effortlessly. Sometimes they are a clear part of the poem’s structure and other times you only see them when you look for them. They add to the humour in First Time Buyers that follows a tour of the viewings of unsuitable houses
Two more stand ready as we file through
the gate of number fifty-two
which backs against the prison. Wire
coils above the back yard, higher
than the listing caught
on film somehow, it seems. Abort!
Yet they are not out of place in the sad At a Friend’s Second Wedding that follows.
My favourite poem in the section is Doubles at the Tennis Club, a beautifully observed piece of social commentary.
He’s a dad, and a lawyer or something. He must get paid
six figures. He’s set the wife up with a cake shop,
or so he’s said. Queen shimmers from the window
of his Audi each time he creeps it up to the clubhouse.
There are doors, gates and borders popping up through this section too, but they don’t batter you over the head.
Section three contains re-tellings of Lincolnshire folk tales. The border here is the line between our reality and the horrors that we like to believe are only in our imagination.
The ballad form is utilised very cleverly here, sometimes breaking the rhythm so it doesn’t become too safe. They are also very funny. In Yallery Brown, the eponymous sprite is described as
Now what would you make of this odd little boggart?
He looked like a gremlin in shrinkwrap,
a Soviet doll left behind at Chernobyl,
a garden gnome slathered in crap.
Stories of an odd wish-granting sprite, a ghost, a michievous imp and a witch are cleverly told and modernised.
From The Lincoln Imp, where the devil-sent creature surveys the North of England:
First he chopped down some trees for a railway line
but made sure that the line never came,
then he raced coast to coast ripping down a Red Wall
then he touched all the moors with a flame
Of course, all folk tales are warnings - don’t get up to no-good in the woods, don’t upset a sprite, and don’t vote Tory.
The collection ends with two standalone poems, Your Solitary Beech, a lovely lyric poem that Waterman dedicates to his mother, and Envoi, that you can read in full in issue 2 of the Fig Tree.
I tried to open your gate. It was huge
an oblong snug in the wall, covered in curls
and blisters of thick green paint, and creaked a bit
but wouldn’t budge from its cradle of alder trunks.
Not all gates can be opened.
This is a considered, technically excellent, beautifully written and powerful collection by a very fine poet. There is a blurring of time and space that is Hardy-esque. The poems are, mostly, instantly understandable yet demand a second or third reading.
Come Here to this Gate is published by, and available from, Carcanet