Come Here to This Gate
Shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collection 2019
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award 2014
"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.
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award 2014
"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.
About the author
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast and grew up mostly in rural Lincolnshire. He was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2012. His poems have appeared in the "TLS", "New Poetries V" (Carcanet, 2011), "Poetry Review", "The Best British Poetry 2012" (Salt, 2012), "Stand", "Agenda", "PN Review" and various other publications, and he co-edits New Walk arts magazine. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Nottingham Trent University. "Tonight the Summer's Over", his first collection, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.