Anthony Caleshu

Rory Waterman

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.

Poetry and Covid-19

It is a commonly held belief that, other than the work of Keith Douglas and perhaps Alun Lewis, the Second World War (1939 - 1945) inspired hardly any poetry of merit, and certainly little to compare to the poets of the Great War of 1914 - 1918. Even in the early 1940s, the literary press in Britain was asking, 'Where are the war poets?' This book addresses why that might have been so, as well as providing ample evidence that the conflict did in fact inspire some of the finest poetry of the twentieth century. It looks in detail at several of the most notable English- language poets of that war, and also provides an overview of the other remarkable poetry about it, helping readers to evaluate the true significance of the Second World War on English-language poetry.

Poets of the Second World War

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.

Sweet Nothings

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.'

Tonight the Summer's Over

Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and poems such as 'Leisure', which came 14th in the BBC's search to find 'The Nation's Favourite Poems', no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context, but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended. The central aim of the book is to reconsider his major works and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period.

Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

W. H. Davies

Wendy Cope is one of Britain's most popular poets: her first two collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in 1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners' choice to succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising, then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's published work, archival material and correspondence, Rory Waterman considers her main collections, her works for children and her uncollected poems, with many close readings, and detailed considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic development.

Wendy Cope

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.

Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley

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.

Rory Waterman

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