ENVOI
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.
Ivy tendrils and leaves hid any view
beyond the slats and bars. I pulled them aside
and that is when I saw you, the ghost of you,
twenty or so, on a splendid little lawn,
laughing with an airman, and beautiful,
and not knowing I’d ever come this way,
that I’d ever exist, not wanting me to.
You’ve told me this, and who am I to argue?
I stepped back, unseen, leaving you in peace,
and called you, fifty-five years later: there’s no
time but the present, no other life for us
to cling to. You were out, and didn’t answer,
but called me back when I was about to go.
Rory Waterman’s third collection of poems is Sweet Nothings, 2020. His next is forthcoming early in 2024. He is Associate Professor of Modern Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
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.
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up mainly in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. His previous full-length 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 a press critic, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
Author photo by Thomas Curtis.
Velvet Pandemic Cage
Bird scarer at 8.00
no minimalism here
yellow wall amplification
Mary’s ambient focus
first Kasar’s ‘Leaping’
& travels into old Europe
It all seems so absurd
Doris writes on the wall
12.4.85 luxury of afternoon
coffee sparrows continue
to chirp through the rain
that gathers on canopies
the Tour hums along while
dealing with mediocrity
Acknowledgements to Mary Lattimore
European Hymns is the fourth collection by Andrew Taylor to be published by Shearsman Books. Over four sections, the book traces the calendar year throughout the seasons. Beginning with the optimism that spring brings, the book offers up the arrival of the nightingales in rural France (an ongoing interest of Taylor’s) then navigates through summer trips to cities, takes in periods of reflection amongst the closing down of a summer house, the sudden shift to Autumn and the inevitable descent into winter.
This is Taylor’s most wide-ranging collection to-date, in turns observ-ational and detailed. The poems also deal with the changes in the natural world, while others offer snapshots of moments in time, with Taylor often re-employing his minimalist practice to useful effect.
From reviews of Not There—Here (2021):
“It’s exhilarating, refreshing writing.” Rupert Loydell, Stride Magazine
“In a sense these poems are cubist, presenting multiple perspectives of a scene or an event without privileging any single one. The poems deny a single, omniscient self. It’s a natural human tendency to impose a narrative on experience, and these poems seem to be trying to strip that away and present experience as it is.” Alan Baker, Litter Magazine
From reviews of March (2017):
“A blast of refreshing air in the gloom of Fenland Winter” —John James
“‘Honesty Box’ is the most recent example of how Taylor’s words can present a more lasting reflection of Time’s inexorable progress. It is an important poem and one that deserves some serious consideration as the latest example of a fine genre in which a human individual contemplates both movement and stasis’ —Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
Andrew Taylor is a founder member of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and poetics has appeared in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos (Salt) and Otoliths. He is co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. As poet-in-residence at Liverpool Architecture and Design Trust he undertook a residency at Liverpool Cathedral where poems and poetics were gathered in the pamphlet Cathedral Poems. He completed a PhD in poetry and poetics in 2008 and teaches English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
This biggest event since this fella turned up in tarn back in the day
Cassius Clay was also photographed with two well-known Nottingham Police Officers. PCs Geoff Baker and Denis ‘Tug’ Wilson were both about 7 feet tall in their boots and helmets.
He in process of writing ‘Sting Like a Bee’…
