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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
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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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
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
