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Poetry and Covid-19
In the summer of 2020, we invited 19 UK poets to partner with poets from around the world, to work collaboratively on poems responding to the virus. The poems are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international.
All The Names Given
From the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019 Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 '[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside.' Mark Haddon 'Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind.' Guardian Raymond Antrobus’s astonishing debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet’s much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.
Sarajevo Roses
Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman's second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move . On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma's Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, where 'selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar'. Sarajevo's 'neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete' is twinned with the 'church spires and rain-bright roofs' of the poet's former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book's title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.
Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley
Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of their age. Waterman looks at the foundations underpinning their poetry; the attempts of all three to forge a sense of belonging with or separateness from their readers; the poets’ varying responses to their geographical and cultural origins; the belonging and estrangement that inheres in relationships, including marriage; the forced estrangements of war; the antagonism between social belonging and a need for isolation; and, finally, the charged issues of faith and mortality in an increasingly secularized country.
Tonight the Summer's Over
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.'
Sweet Nothings
Sweet Nothings 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.
Moving Day
Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how an individual relates to others. All the poems are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known - or half known - past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.
The Poem Is You
The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
The Seasons of Cullen Church
A new collection of expert lyric poems from Bernard O'Donoghue, which movingly animates the characters of his childhood in County Cork.
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.
