Criticism, like poetry, cannot be written at arm’s length. At least not the best. The critic has to suffer the imperilment of the artist: enjoy a brief triumph, endure a trudge through morass. Not full of platitudes, yet not bereft of sympathy either, the critic must realise that the poet’s plod can become a flight at the turnpike of the next sentence, or a flight can slam into a ‘concrete’ end, just as easily. Rarely do critics keep the faith with poets, all the way. Nor do they often take a step back to roll their eyes and have a good laugh, about poetry and attempts at the ‘poetic.’
By contrast, Rory Waterman does take a step back, and he also keeps the faith. An accomplished and distinct voice in poetry himself, Waterman takes to criticism with the same honesty, courage and an eye for the original and powerful that characterises much of his own work.
Endless Present is Waterman’s selection from fourteen years of engagement with the craft and art of poetry. One should consider the introduction to the collection as the sixty-eighth essay in it. It moors his art of reading and criticism in the vicissitude of his life, the vagaries of time, the lucky breaks and occasional epiphanies of growing up. Waterman shies away from being the omnipotent absence in his criticism. Rather, he puts himself right in harm’s way as a poet and reader while writing about the poetry of others. In a way his introduction chimes, uncannily, with the text of the eulogy delivered at his father’s funeral (later published in the PN Review).
Waterman emerges as someone who is prepared to wrangle with his own choices and preferences, to be refreshingly not sure, and to let it all play out, in public, in his reviews and longer essays. An expanse of writing that has Philip Larkin and Daljit Nagra, the late 1950s and the second decade of the new millennium as its landmarks of space and time, Waterman’s collected criticism is endlessly present. It offers a view of where he sits (when critical writing about poetry has elsewhere become an anonymous exercise in intellectual generalisation) and writes words neither salaried, nor pensioned.
Debasish Lahiri is an internationally acclaimed poet. He has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Legion of Lost Letters (Black Spring Press, 2023). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.
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