Tonight the Summer's Over - Rory Waterman - E-Book

Tonight the Summer's Over E-Book

Rory Waterman

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Beschreibung

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.'

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Seitenzahl: 37

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

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RORY WATERMAN

Tonight the Summer’s Over

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications, in which many of these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different forms: Able Muse, Agenda, The Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012), The Bow-Wow Shop, Clinic, The Dark Horse, Days of Roses Anthology II, Endymion, English, The Interpreter’s House, Manchester Review, The Morning Star, The New Criterion, New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011), The North, Not Only the Dark (WordAid, 2011), Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, PN Review, Poetry, Poetry Review, Raintown Review, Shit Creek Review, Smiths Knoll, Stand, Staple, The Times Literary Supplement.

I am grateful for the gift of a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012.

Contents

Title PageAcknowledgements Navigating Family Business Visiting Grandpa Retrospect What Passing Bells Rebirth Island In the Avenue of Limes An Email from Your Mother Two Growing Pains 1. Distance2. For My Father3. Ireland, 10Access Visit Seeing Him Off at the Station Craigmillar Castle at Dusk Faroe Islands: Notes for Three Photographs Nettles Reverdie Seeing Baby Emrys in Gwynedd Salisbury, After the Argument For R.S. Thomas Coming Home From a Birmingham Council Flat Broadland Where Were You When… The Outings A Suicide West Summerdale Ave 53° 09'33.17" N, 0° 25'33.18" W To Help the Birds through Winter The Lake Shrine for a Young Soldier, Castle Drogo On Derry City Walls, 1992 Unfolding Marstrand Winter Morning, Connecticut A Wedding Photograph Back in the Village Compulsions The Fields over Winceby Battlefield Spring Shower, Metheringham Fen The Beck Keepsakes ‘You’re a shower of bastards’ Note to Self: Chip Shop Battered Sausage and Other Meat Stopping for a Moment on Exmoor Back Infant Stranger Sendai Fall Hallowed Turf The Shipwreck Memorial a Mile from Town Over the Heath Out to the Fen About the AuthorCopyright

Navigating

A heron burst from the bank where we hadn’t seen it

to out of sight beneath the tree-bitten sky

            the way we were heading.

Let’s follow! So, a dawdle became the pursuit

of something that we couldn’t realise.

We paddled and ruddered, slick through spilling rapids,

round snags and boulders, churned small dark-skinned deeps

            as otters and crayfish hid;

sparrows and whatnot cheeped; cows chewed at the lip

of a sudden meander, and watched us ignoring them;

and inverted willows shivered with river-weeds,

where toppled half-drowned boughs cut withering chevrons

             along each shadowed straight.

We were happy – weren’t we? – because each bend was blind.

We must pursue, and not expect to find.

Family Business

The boatman stares through million-pock-marked waters,

tapping a cigarette, shying from the rain

in mac and wellies, beneath a London plane

that rustles and drips. He turns and tells his daughter

to bolt the hut. Tonight the summer’s over.

He heaves the skiff to the boatshed, ties the lines

and double-locks the door. She fits a sign:

CLOSED FOR SEESON. They load a battered Land Rover

with cash tin, radio, stools, as fast as they can,

for it’s raining harder. Lightning blanks the dark,

and then they’re away, the wiper thwacking its arc.

She glances at this ordinary man

then shuts her eyes: she’s damp and tired and bored.

He drives more gently. Neither says a word.

Visiting Grandpa

He gave her a photo of great-grandma Alice

and a small box of medals he’d won in the War.

She tried on his glasses and giggled, and listened

to the clicks of his pacemaker, cheek to chest,

and wound up his watch, and shook-shook his tablets,

but he didn’t say what they were for.

When he died of the cancer she wasn’t to see him,

her mum said. You can’t show a child of four

what the body might do to itself. So one evening

she learned about heaven, how people looked down

and smiled. And she tried not to cry, and she hid

the medals her grandpa once wore.

Retrospect

How does an owl get hit by a train?

Pristine, unbloodied, slightly flat:

at thirteen you don’t think it’s anything