Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Endless Present: Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23" by Rory Waterman

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. 

About the reviewer
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.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Come Here to this Gate" by Rory Waterman

This is a beautiful collection in three parts. The first part consists of a visceral remembrance of the author's father and the weight of his death due to alcoholic dementia. Here are memories that can never be forgotten, heaped with regret and self-loathing. The sequence is a disturbing, harrowing picture of loss, that we almost don't want to witness. We hide behind the pages, as it were, trying to understand Waterman's feelings, his anger and his love. He communicates his emotions in such a transparent manner, we are there at the bedside, there at the beginning of the end, and the final moments.

Remembered and mis-remembered events cloud his memories and we follow in his steps as he faces his father's death. With his father’s rambling, ranting, his anger unbound, nothing is erased from Waterman's memory, especially his love for his father.

After the horrors of the first section, we are taken through the gates of the second part of the collection, invited into another world. There is real beauty here in the descriptions that bring events to life. We are there picking gooseberries, we taste the fear of the narrator's visit to a chiropodist and we share the despair as his bike is stolen. The humour in the poem "Student Cuts" is blatant and laugh out loud, but then we are moved to tears by the sadness in "The Stepfathers" and earlier "At a Friend's Second Wedding," where death looks over the shoulder of the Mother who sits and watches the marriage.

Waterman's travels are described eloquently and are intriguing as are the friendships he makes and describes. None of the words are misplaced or misused and his journey takes us to the final part of the collection - an odyssey through Lincolnshire Folk Tales. Here, Waterman intertwines his own memories with tales from long ago and reflects on the world that has been lost. We can see the love for his home county. I loved "Nanny Rutt" with its humour and disdain for so-called decency. It flows like a song - a song for life and imagined worlds, just as this collection is a celebratory song of loss, life and love.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Something Happens, Sometimes Here: Contemporary Lincolnshire Poetry," ed. Rory Waterman

 

          Suddenly, the shattered hedges, ancient culverts, 
          our huge ruined villages, give way as 
          dimpled fields tilt to the Fen 
          and the treeless otherworld begins.  

- Rory Waterman

A seductive title that draws the reader in, even before s/he’s had chance to crack the spine - whose interest can’t fail to be piqued by the claim that Something Happens, Sometimes Here? This is a short collection of poetry by a selection of writers who were either been born, lived or worked in the Lincolnshire Fenlands, and who have been inspired to turn to words to express the effect this watery landscape has had on them. Anyone familiar with the region will understand how the landscape gets under the skin, as it did with these poets' predecessor Tennyson, who liked to evoke the ‘silent woody places’  of his youth. This is a land of dykes and sluices that fight a constant war with water, keeping the sea at bay with an army of workmen who brought their own tales and superstitions. Alison Brackenbury sums this up with her poem simply titled 'Ditches': 

          Still they lie deep, though I have gone, 
          The great dykes with their glinting load, 
          brown winter floods, fields’ wasteful run, 
          planted too soon. Are there machines 
          which rear and dip from the firm road, 
          scoop glistening banks, clear rotted leaves?

          Yet still, I know, there is a day –
          A stone-blocked pipe, a tumble tree-
         When a man slides down with a spade,
         Beats back dead nettles, elder’s switch,
         sunk from sky as under sea, 
         dig, sweats and clears the gurgling ditch. 
 

The workmen, once locally called ‘Fen Tigers,’ are a presence in the book as they dig and clear the ditches, sweating and telling us tales as they work at the mercy of the elements and the attack of rats and the fatal Weil’s disease. This marshy land evokes memories of a time past and proves, as Robert Macfarlane claims in his book The Old Ways, that we recall a land most keenly once we have left it: ‘there are landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after we have withdrawn in actuality.’ Some poems are an ode to a way of life which is gradually being lost, as with Rory Waterman’s simply titled: '53 9’33.17”N, 0 25’33.18”W,' a grid reference to a place long abandoned and left to be reclaimed by mother nature, and in Alison Brackenbury’s 'The House':

          Hard through the dream’s cold spring I raised
          My house again. My bones and heart ache
          In every joist. 

Waterman wanted to collate a range of voices in this book and saw it as a response to Ian Park’s Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. Setting out to showcase the poetry that was inspired by land ‘where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet,’ the fenlands are England’s second biggest county, but often a land overlooked.

The more recent ‘bastard countryside’ of mud, litter and graffiti is nicely summed up in his poem 'Pulling over to Inspect a Pillbox with a North American Tourist.' This rings true of the wasteland the Fens have become today - a home to scrapyards and dog kennels, food processing plants and used tyre collections, concrete pillar boxes and rusting Nissan huts. Nonetheless, this landscape still has the ability to inspire poetry. I can recommend this collection to anyone who has ever driven over this vast flat land on the way to somewhere else, and been curious to discover just who is it that chooses to live here? 

 

About the reviewer

As a teacher of Art and Design for over thirty years, Tracey Foster has channelled her imagination into getting the best creative output out of others. She is now hoping to restore her create mojo and has enrolled on the Creative Writing MA course at Leicester University. Last year, she completed the Comma Press short story course with Rebecca Burns and collectively published Tales from Garden Street. She is due to have first poem published by the Poetry Bus magazine and is currently working on a poetry collection.

Review by Rosalind Adam of Poetry Reading by Douglas Dunn and Rory Waterman at Literary Leicester

Poetry Reading by Douglas Dunn and Rory Waterman, hosted by Nick Everett, at Literary Leicester Festival, 2017

We descended metal and glass into the heart of Fielding Johnson’s South Wing. This, we knew, was going to be good. In the midst of yet another frenetically successful Literary Leicester week, we were about to be treated to an hour of poetry, an hour of pure pleasure, and we weren’t disappointed.

Rory Waterman is no stranger to Leicester University having studied for his BA and PhD here. His warm, self-deprecating humour had us all smiling along as he regaled the horrors of life in the staff room, the agonies of teenage years and travels through cities remembered, reading from his latest collection, Sarajevo Roses, and his earlier collection, Tonight the Summer’s Over.

Douglas Dunn, we were told, had travelled down on the 5.30 am train from Scotland to introduce us to The Noise of a Fly, his first poetry collection in sixteen years. The book blurb promises a collection ‘brimming with warmth, mischief and humour’ which is absolutely correct. Dunn has not been labelled ‘the most respected Scottish poet of his generation’ for nothing. He treated us to his own style of self-deprecating humour which the first line of his poem 'Thursday' well illustrates: ‘Gave yet another lecture. God, I’m boring.’

His gentle delivery belied some gritty content. 'The Nothing-But' contains lines that speak of emotions few people have ever committed to words: 'To have kissed the lips of one who is dying / Is to have tasted silence, salt and wilderness.’

Of all the funny, fascinating and moving lines we heard that evening, if I had to choose a favourite, it would be Douglas Dunn’s line about a poem trapped in an empty fountain pen, because we all have poems like that … or is it just me? 

About the reviewer
Rosalind Adam is a writer and student on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Her blog is: http://rosalindadam.blogspot.co.uk/